YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney
hollywoodreporter.com
hollywoodreporter.com
I wish the BBC would publish their whole archive through YT. The few things that they do put up are often so mind expanding whether it's Berty Russel, The Beatles, or some cracking Scottish chap going for a bike ride with a bottle of whisky.
Search results are also non-exhaustive and biased towards recent videos as noted in this study https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11727
Basically many videos can no longer be discovered if you don't have a url to the video or the channel, and the algorithm doesn't recommend it
Wait...
The more likely explanation is that Google doesn't want YouTube to be crawled, which gives them a massive moat for AI training
e.g this will return videos published in that time range with a duration longer than 2m
cat videos after:2014-01-01 before:2014-12-31 >2m
[edit] - the duration doesn't remove shorts I think there's just no shorts published in that time range.
I've seen that one!
When I looked it up, turns out I've seen it too!
Grady Smith published an investigative video titled "This TikTok Girl Band Ruined My Life" on October 18, 2022. The project focuses on Taylor Red, a group of triplet sisters with red hair who originally started as a traditional country band. Smith's video explores their transition from serious musicians to creators of surreal, fast-paced TikTok and YouTube content that appears specifically designed to capture the attention of toddlers and children.> I didn't a single thing about that I find there pretty much daily.
Rarely(never?) have I found new knowledge on youtube, however its a great source of joy/emotions/slop.
I'm searching Google trying to figure out what you're talking about but not getting any meaningful results.
Barely literate workers in 3rd world countries then went on a mass "moderation" spree deleting anything that might even remotely be considered controversial
Videos with millions of views were delisted overnight and the associated channels received community standards violation strikes
https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/ads-shown-isis... )
I have de-lurked because I can actually contribute to this. I am almost positive that what this is referring to is the time ISIS/ISIL (as it was still sometimes referred to then) uploaded the first video of one of their hostages (a kidnapped journalist?) being beheaded on YouTube. It would have been between 2013 and 2017 inclusive.
Advertising was in full swing on youtube with household names like Pepsi and McDonalds advertising regularly on youtube. BUT ads weren't restricted to certain types of videos then... i don't know if you were paying attention to world events then but ISIS was always in the news and when they released the beheading video it was linked EVERYWHERE. so of course when people went to go and watch a gruesome beheading, before or after it played they would see "da da da da da, I'm loving it".
There was a brief but MASSIVE public outrage against any company whose advertisements were involved, because people thought these companies were endorsing ISIS and beheadings. They didn't understand that the advertisers were paying Youtube for coverage but had no say in exactly what videos recevied what ads. They just blamed the companies they saw in connection with the video. As damage control, these major companies of course instantly pulled all ads from running on youtube and pointed the finger at YouTube, LOUDLY. Youtube lost a substantial amount of revenue and reputation pretty much overnight. Probably in less than 24 hrs. To repair their own reputation and become an attractive and reliable investment for advertisers asap, YouTube immediately took measures to prevent this occurring again. Thus was the first purge.
I do not remember what other measures or standards were originally but they've changed over the years since. Most of the people talking about its rollon effects were youtubers talking about how it affected them personally in youtube videos, with vague or dramatic titles, which is why you would not find many results on google. They didnt want google to find them and see them criticising them and take their videos down too. I do not think the cottage industry we now have around influencers and content creation, including networking and news, had really gotten off the ground then, so nobody that i can think of would have been systematically documenting it in a written text-searchable form. Thus, no google presence.
It's really scary to me that such a major shaping event in our online lives and thus our culture has gone largely undocumented except through videos which people delist, delete, or get copyright struck down, all the time.
Tldr: Isis has a substantial share in the blame for ruining youtube. Isis is still going.
Did you ever try? There are experts in many fields posting about all kinds of stuff in there, from professional knowledge, to the most mainstream of hobbies, to very obscure stuff.
I suspect you are not looking very hard. I have learned a tremendous amount about everything from stone cutting to metalworking to welding to Kalman filters to linear algebra. There is a lot out there. The main annoyance I have is keeping AI slop out of my feed so that I can instead learn from genuine experts. There is a huge amount out there.
This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3emFAf3jqQQ for example is from 15 years ago with 102 views right now.
(Not to mention reputational risk, which is why so many episodes of Top Of The Pops are hidden)
Right now it's ruining it's own content by overoptimizing for engagement slop. Making the creators dumber and consumers poorer, limiting ad growth in the long term.
The content is one of humani .... oh it is all of ... oh its in the hands of ... a commercial company renowned for adverts.
Is there not a better place for human creativity than ... Google? Should my TV license fee fund Google?
Fuck off (hyperbolically)!
As opposed to governments renowned for colonizing half the world, destroying countless cultures, committing genocide in living memory?
Yes. Private companies are capable of the same, with addition of having profit as a sole purpose of existence.
https://invidious.io https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
An accessible interface to YouTube content without tracking, using a decentralized network of community-run instances that scrape, rather than API-call, site data.
[EDIT]
Also Yattee doing the Lord's work:
https://github.com/yattee/yattee
Privacy oriented video player for iOS, tvOS and macOS with Invidious support.
At some point I will set up a yt-dlp thing to download the videos I want because the public instance invidious experience recently has not been great. I could also try a self-hosted invidious.
Something interesting is considering the privacy benefits of watching the content on a privacy frontend while sitll talking directly to youtube. Does it prevent the fingerprinting? Does it improve your privacy significantly?
I imagine the shared frontend proxy approach is best for privacy, but is not reliable currently.
photon-reddit.com has been a gamechanger for one specific feature—it lets you recover deleted comments and posts. But, I have found it less reliable than redlib.
It has been this way for years. Seems odd.
[1] https://docs.invidious.io/community-installation-guide/#crea...
After hopping between several in the past, I've learned to avoid services that blatantly violate TOS for their existence, since they rarely last long, usually going private once the cease and desist letters start coming.
I ended up just going with the non-music youtube premium "lite" for $8/month.
I have the family plan shared across six accounts, and it went to $26, which really isn't that much but I'm not entirely sure why they're doing it.
It is not like Amazon. Most people get Amazon Prime for the "free" shipping, and Prime with ads is a good value proposition, you get shipping but get a discount on the part that doesn't interest you. I don't get why tying a shipping to a streaming service isn't more controversial by the way, it is borderline illegal.
Oh, and by the way, ad-free is not really ad-free, you still have sponsored segments, but these are not under YouTube control.
The entire point is to find more ways to make money. They will try new ways as longs as there is too big drop in the users.
You could've easily made this argument about Hulu right before it did the exact same thing being described here.
>If they put back ads, I believe that most people will simply cancel their subscription and get a renewed interest in ad-blockers.
Doing this successfully on your smart TV is a barrier that most non-techy folk aren't going to climb over. In the case of Hulu, most people just... accepted it. Same with the Amazon Prime ads you mentioned.
The main point of paying for Hulu was to be able to watch the shows. Youtube doesn't have that. (They tried to have premium-only shows but it was never much and as far as I can tell they stopped a long time ago.) So while youtube could obviously increase the price another $3, I don't see how they could split off a viable premium-with-ads plan. The premium features outside of ad removal are close to worthless.
Dunno, big corporations really like showing ads for some reason. I think Google, whose main business is ads, will try to shove them in more peoples' faces, and claim that YouTube Premium will be "reduced ads" and then there will be YouTube Premium+ that has no ads, for a nominal fee, of course.
The entire point of premium as it already stands is ad removal. None of the other features are relevant (I don't even know what they are)
The question is how annoying the ads are. One 15 second ad before an hour long video, I'm annoyed but I'm not going to flip the table over. 5 minutes of ads every 30 mins? At some point I'm getting annoyed enough to cancel my subscription.
As the number of users and the price go up, it may make sense to add a middle group: people who are willing to pay some smaller amount to remove (or otherwise reduce the impact) some of the ads.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I have a very strong, borderline-irrational distaste for ads. I hate advertising, I hate having to watch advertisements, I will go out of my way considerably to avoid ads. I have over 400 blu-rays specifically because I wanted to guarantee that I don't have to risk seeing ads in my media.
I liked YouTube Premium because it was an ethical way to avoid ads on YouTube; there's always been adblock but I always felt bad depriving creators of their revenue; most of them (at least at the time) weren't big heartless corporations, they were individuals creating stuff.
If I start seeing ads unless I'm extorted for more money, that might end up being a final straw for me.
This does make me the unethical bad-guy, but my aversion to advertisement is so strong that I can't feel any remorse. AdSense is a scourge on the internet, and once Google is held accountable for it they'll immediately try to extort their licensed library of millions of videos to make a living. And they'll have to try a lot harder than that if they want to deprive me of a daily Tom Scott video with my morning coffee.
Why would you behave ethically towards a company that is anything but?
The slight remorse I feel by not using official YT frontends is towards creators I enjoy watching, who I try to support via other means, if possible. But then again, any creator or business who chooses advertising as their only business model doesn't deserve my support.
Advertising is a scourge on humanity. It corrupts every medium of information by allowing sleazy middlemen to psychologically manipulate one party not just into buying products out of manufactured desire, but into thinking and behaving in ways that serve someone's agenda. It is weaponized via platforms built by adtech companies, which have played a major role in the current sociopolitical instability in the world. It is so insidious that even though it has concentrated incredible amounts of wealth into the hands of a few, most people see it as harmless because they get products and services for "free". To hell with all of that.
I do believe the better solution is to go to DIY channel, but yeah. I got Amazon Prime, which gives me free shipping on Amazon. Add on top of that, I can freely support one Twitch stream. So I am going with Critical Role. They also sell their own platform, but it is more expensive than Bezos' deal. It is hard to compete with big tech...
I got a hunch feeling my IPv4 is shitlisted here and there though, but it could also be Linux + Firefox + plethora of extensions. I'll get a new IPv4 soon, so a good time to also clear all my cookies and part with some extensions.
That's what I felt bad about. I didn't care if I was depriving Google of money, but I was watching a lot of videos of relatively small channels, and I was watching them with ad block, and I wasn't compensating them otherwise. In a bit of fairness (though not much) I was not making much money at the time.
I agree that advertising is bad for humanity. I hate ads. I don't like the idea that a corporation is weaponizing my psychology to sell me crap I don't need. For the most part I would rather pay for things, but of course I make a lot more money now than I did back in 2015.
I've said it before, but I think it bears repeating: people will pay for things if those things don't suck. I think it speaks to the shittiness of the platforms that people will only use stuff like Facebook and YouTube if they're "free".
How is it any different than the price increases that have happened up until now? Or do you mean $27 per month for up to 6 accounts is the most you will ever be willing to pay?
Amazon Prime has ads by default now, or you can get rid of the ads if you pay an additional $3 a month.
If they start showing some amount of ads on my YouTube Premium, and start charging a fee to get rid of all of them, I think it will just piss me off; I already pay for YouTube Premium, I am not going to pay extra for extra ad free.
It is simply a change in price, dressed up to be more palatable for people who are not as discerning.
Before, Amazon Prime Video without ads was the price of Amazon Prime. Then it became the price of Amazon Prime plus $3 per month. Now it's the price of Amazon Prime plus $5 per month or $46 per year.
Same thing with Youtube, or any other product/service, price changes happen all the time. Pay if it is worth it, or don't if it's no longer worth it.
I've grown kind of tired of YouTube as of late anyway, and it's not like I get a lot out of it in any kind of deep meaningful sense. I probably could fairly easily justify canceling it and surviving on my blu-rays.
You can either reduce the product or increase prices, or both if you're really going for it.
Don't Blu-Rays and DVDs have unskippable ads built in, including the FBI notice?
No one demanded anything! I'm not certain that the firehose of "content" that youtube is creating is all that valuable to humanity, and I won't subject myself to ads to support it's existence.
YouTube's competitive advantage is their ability to pay video makers, not their video playback tech. And to make a competitor that has any kind of traction, this problem needs to be solved in a more reasonable way than "I'll somehow find a way to pay someone maybe".
It's like saying McDonalds doesn't have any competitor.
The above is from the comment I replied to. Netflix, Prime, Disney, cable TV, satellite TV, etc are without any kind of doubt competitors to YouTube within video entertainment.
Just because companies have different ways of doing business doesn't mean they're not competitors.
If your kids won't eat any fast food except McDonalds, it doesn't mean that there are no fast food competitors. The same for video entertainment.
To be fair: not everything is shite and Youtube is my favorite social media (especially for discovering new music), but I noticed a big drop in quality videos from one day to the other a couple of years ago. Just opening up Youtube one day and seeing all kinds of thumbnails with people with their mouth open, very 'colory' thumbnails (more childlike), channels that I would never watch being presented... I should have noted the exact date, but I didn't. I guess it was around two years ago.
Even searching for specific topics is hard. I just know there's enough material on the platform, but in my search results I get so many doubles and channels that I already know. I can keep scrolling, but to no result.
If anybody knows some good DIY or woodworking channels, let me know!
Of the 30 videos currently proposed to be on front page I'd consider watching maybe 4 of them. To be honest I'm a big fan of the change they made to occasionally show new content because it actually provides some novelty (one of those 4 is of a video from a creator with only 19 subscribers).
Even if you consistently "not interested", the algorithm never ever figures out the overlapping theme is that you (generally) don't like low view count low subscriber count content.
I just wish they'd recognize that the fifty-first time I don't watch a video they should find something else to show me.
(I just wanted to use Mr Guy in a sentence once in my life)
- Of the topmost 4 videos I would consider watching one because I am already subscribed to the channel and even have the particular video in Watch Later (so what's the point?)
- Shorts appearing again and again after I explicitly remove them, taking up valuable space
- Below some random videos half of which I am already subscribed to so I can see them in Subscriptions - no need for duplicates
- The other half in large part is of doomerism, although I don't watch that content
All videos are monetized. Some videos don't do rev share with the author, but YouTube still gets the ad rev.
Admittedly, I rarely "browse" YouTube looking for new things. I typically find new channels either from other sources (reddit, Twitter, etc.) or because one channel mentions another channel.
A woodworker and former RIM engineer -- if you don't already know his channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Matthiaswandel
- Some screwing into end grain. Looks good on camera but it's complete junk.
- A 'hobbyist' with a commercial workshop worth tens of thousands of dollars making it look easy.
Now I have to give one back... Maybe you don't know Marius Hornberger, I really enjoy his maker videos.
It's the tyranny of the marginal user. How I wish YouTube (and generally other platforms for user-generated content) would have fine-grained search and filtering controls that let me specify exactly what I want, no recommendation algorithm trying to guess what I actually meant. But such a feature won't attract and retain the least interested people, so we'll never get it.
Either I'm doing something very right, or everyone else is doing something very wrong, because my front page of YouTube is fine.
Most of my front page is videos about games I play or have played (Factorio, Arc Raiders, Cyberpunk 2077, Cities: Skylines, and more), dash cam compilations (Which I watch a lot of), and various videos from channels I'm subscribed to such as Kurzgesagt, Chubbyemu, ElectroBOOM, LockPickingLawyer, Engineering Explained, Veritasium (Just discovered Newcomb's Problem and I'm a solid one-boxer) and more.
I never see Mr Beast or any of the other channels people complain about recommended to me. Every recommendation is relevant. YouTube knows me well.
Somehow, it just seems some people use YouTube in such a way that YouTube can't figure out what you like, and so you just get a default recommendation.
As soon as I see a clickbait thumbnail/title, I ask to not show it anymore.
On a daily basis I get 90% of interesting content on the home page.
It particularly works great for music; now I get better recommendations from YouTube than from Spotify (which is my main music platform).
There are dozens of great channels in those spaces. Here are some I remember just off the top of my head.
* Cars: Watch Wes Work (need 1.5x speed here!), Prop Department, Mat Armstrong, Chris Fix
* Woodworking: Frank Howarth, Matthias Wandel, The Wood Whisperer, John Heisz, Steve Ramsey
* Metalworking: Clickspring, Cronova Engineering, Tubal Cain
* General DIY/inventions: DIY Perks, Uri Tuchman, Stuff Made Here, Colin Furze, Applied Science, Breaking Taps
I think it's actually not too bad at surfacing this stuff. They also have a "New to You" button you can click.
My main complaint is it will recommend a specific video to you for aaaages without you clicking on it before it finally realises you aren't interested. You can manually say you aren't interested, but it's two clicks and you shouldn't need to do that anyway.
Indeed not hard to surface, but a handful of channels is a drop in the ocean of all the videos that must have been uploaded and are at least nice to watch and informative. Sometimes I get these rare gems inside my recommendations; a small channel with a couple of very interesting videos, maybe not the best or slickest productions, but definitely of interest. I guess the algo strongly favors a regular upload rhythm.
I can subscribe to these channels, but I can't even find them in my subscriptions. There's no overview, and sometimes I subscribe to channels that I know I already subscribed to (the channels themselves also experienced this unsubscribing behavior and made this known in their videos).
> My main complaint is it will recommend a specific video to you for aaaages without you clicking on it before it finally realises you aren't interested. You can manually say you aren't interested, but it's two clicks and you shouldn't need to do that anyway.
Completely agree!
You can just click "subscriptions" on the left to only show videos from channels you are subscribed to, and then there's another button somewhere to show a list of your subscriptions.
> a handful of channels is a drop in the ocean of all the videos that must have been uploaded and are at least nice to watch and informative
It wasn't an exhaustive list!
Check out Peter Millard.
At the same time, YouTube is an incredible resources; a civilizational achievement. It's a library of an enormous amount of knowledge, often presented in an engaging manner and well summarized. You can learn an enormous amount of things on YouTube.
I wish we could have one without the other, but all those videos servers don't pay for themselves, and the good stuff doesn't come without an enormous amount of subpar video content, and the stuff that pays is rarely the most useful.
I try to never engage with recommendations or the home screen, but it's hard especially when I'm tired or otherwise low on willpower.
Ideally I could get a YouTube app that's just a search box and can handle links that I click from other sources. I don't know if that exists and if it does, Google has a strong incentive to shut it down.
I rarely ever open anything else but https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
you'd be surprised both how different recommendations can be, and how fast algorithm recognizes that it is you and starts giving all the same stuff again
but still, that's the best way of discovering new things that I've found
What is with the thumbnails?!? I mean, I know what's with them- content makers have found a technique that works, and are beating that dead horse until it stops coughing up money. [1]
I guess my question is- what is with the median Youtube viewer? Are they just completely governed by their id? Does it not register that they're falling for the same bait every single time? That would bother me, but if people realize they're being manipulated and are fine with it, I guess that makes me the old man yelling at clouds. Oh well, I've been called worse.
At some point I looked too long at a thirst trap and now all I get is OF girls jumping on trampolines and stuff like that, despite spending literal days of time on longer form content for every second I've glanced at that stuff. They just really want me to interact with their Shorts doomscroll. It certainly has the scent of enshitification since Shorts.
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/441709-youtube-anti-shorts
Yep, for some reasons the recommendation engines seem to have become “oh you glanced at this post for 2 second or you watched a single video, this must be exclusively what you want”
I’ve seen it on social media too, notably Facebook.
Worse than that, at times my home page feed has been 5-10% "Here's a video you've already watched all the way through. Want to watch it again?" recommendations. Like YT can see I've watched the video - why are so many videos I've watched being "recommended" for me?
Then HBO did a machine gun fire of price increases so I cancelled.
For the next few weeks every single YouTube recommended video was an HBO show/movie.
If you scroll down on suggested videos after watching something, it is pretty easy to see how it works. Just keep scrolling and eventually it does start to cycle in a loop of only a few unique options.
Youtube cannot help with discovery because it does not increase watch time. It is far more likely that an autoplay of a “safe known” video will be watched then something new.
The “remove video thumbnail” and “remove YouTube shorts” chrome extension is a must install though.
The entire original advantage these tech companies had over traditional entertainment and media companies was their access to data and their ability to use that for targeted advertising. It was supposed to be a win-win, so they claimed. The viewer would get targeted advertising to match their interests and brands would get their ads delivered in a hyper accurate way.
Instead, the ads are just garbage. If anything, most of the ads I see on my tv (the only time I see ads on youtube) are worse than the ads I see in traditional media, like magazines or TV, in the sense that they literally don't feel targeted or curated at all. I watch tons of bike races and highlights on youtube TV and then almost all my ads are for cars, generic laundry detergent, and obvious scam crap products, anything but something bike related! Do you know where I do see far better targeted advertising? Bike magazines and print media!
The entire idea that youtube is good at what they do (to make money) just seems to be a sham in my experience.
But the interesting thing is that, statistically what they are serving maximizes their revenue. So they have the best version of what they want to do, and it keeps maximizing their objectives (profit).
The problem is that such objective became somewhat perpendicular to what some people like. It's funny but maybe watching that stupid Ad, somehow makes you do something that in the end makes them profit.
If I had to guess, niche products for niche interests have small ad budgets, but the random detergent ad buyer is happy to bid on anyone's eyeballs. You can't target ad buys that don't exist!
On the other hand, before I bought YT premium I was regularly getting ads for Chevron gas in Spanish (which I don't speak), and would be unsurprised if YT ad enshittification drove premium sales.
> remove video thumbnail” and “remove YouTube shorts” chrome extension is a must install
Which is it? Does YouTube respect your time and attention as a user or does it prey on them? I'm pretty sure it's the latter.
The fact that you can pay to opt out of ads has always seemed like a weird business decision to me. Sabotage your ad viewership by siphoning off users with spending money for things like an ad-free subscription. I suppose it prevents losing users to paid platforms or those who just wouldn't tolerate ads at all, and gives an out for users who would otherwise contribute to the ads vs ad blockers arms race.
I'd like Youtube to one day enable me to disable the fun colors in-app, but that's not a requirement. At the end of the day, the onus is on me, first, to number my days. (Psalm 90:12)
I'm sympathetic to the idea that most internet websites are addicting and bad for society, but I think the blame-game obscures our own agency, which we pretend not to have, and overemphasizes the platform's power, which isn't as strong as we pretend. We're not victims, they're not Gods.
Yes we do have agency. Also the platforms employ psychologists and designers and run experiments specifically to engagement hack human brains to increase ad watch time. That's a really tough opponent for individual humans.
Disney on the other hand is an IP curation firm. Sure they make money on movie tickets and subscriptions and merchandise, but they create value by creating and maintaining a litany of characters, stories, and settings which are priced based on the idea they can be milked essentially forever. Disney could pump out flop after flop after flop, but so long as those flops keep Disney owned characters alive in the zeitgeist, it's a financial win. Obviously Disney needs revenue, but it's valuation is only loosely related to its current revenue.
What additional benefits would ownership grand Youtube? It seems like they have everything worth having (under “License to Youtube, Duration of License, and Right to Monetize”).
Couldn't imagine using YouTube on my phone without it, it's night and day difference – that's despite being a premium subscriber anyway.
11 years ago it was already clear there was a great path to profits, even if they weren't profitable at that point.
Just for reference in 2025 annual year, the experiences division generated just a casual $36 billion with a pretty high profit margin.
This really doesn't seem like an apples to apple comparision. Youtube is nothing like Disney fundamentally
But if the 99% garbage is the price of the emerging of channels like 3B1B, I think it's still a pretty good deal.
Yeah, exactly. I believe this is the main reason the quality is so bad. Comments with any negative language get pushed down, creating an empty (sometimes toxic), artificial positive atmosphere.
Somewhat tempted to re-enable it as I only really comment on videos that are for very very niche communities and I'm usually answering or asking questions.
>anyone here in CURRENTYEAR
>This is scene is so [adjective]
Not exactly a forum, more like a concert crowd
But even shorts, assuming they're like reels/stories, the "social" aspect is very minimal compared with, say, Facebook posts back in the day, where your friends would see and comment and reply to each other.
The Algorithm doesn't really want that anymore; it wants to feed you content from arbitrary people to keep you passively engaged, not to foster conversation/active engagement.
The thing with traditional media is that it's all about limits and compromise and trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The TV and radio airwaves are limited, as is the schedule. Cinemas and screening times are limited. Shops selling books are limited. Etc.
So what you get is very generic and milquetoast. It's bland content aimed at a large audience that (presumably) doesn't want to think too hard or leave their comfort zone, which is designed to appeal to every possible region on Earth at the same time and which doesn't scare away corporate types that see anything outside of a few specific genres as too risky to deal with.
Much of what's on YouTube isn't like that. Yeah, there are censorship issues and other such problems, but many of the videos and channels there are as niche as niche can be, and all the better because of it. You don't need to care if your videos appeal to 300 million people in the US or are understandable to a few billion worldwide, you just need to care that an audience that wants that sort of content can discover them and find value from it.
Almost every commenter on this site watches something different on YouTube, often about topics that appeal to only a tiny percentage of the population. Platforms like YouTube can support that, traditional media companies can't.
The cumulative impact of all those different channels and creators is bigger than any small library of mass market works could ever be.
Sure, there's a long tail of people who do free labor for YouTube by publishing niche reviews or science lectures and never seeing a penny, but if they disappeared overnight, I don't think that YT viewership or revenue would budge.
YT might have gained steam as a video equivalent of the old Reddit, but it converged on mass-consumption of professionally-produced, focus-group-tested content.
By any precedent YouTube is radically decentralized. Yes, the view concentration follows a power law, and the power law beats the long tail, but you have to add up thousands of channels to get a majority of YouTube views. Think about how that compares to the overall media landscape. Any two TV channels would yield a majority of viewers. The diversity and decentralization on YouTube is much greater.
I think a big factor is that it's low friction. Just open the link or search whatever you want and it plays. It's not like cable where you need to sign up for a service, or Netflix where you need to scroll around in previews selecting for your next show, it's always on your phone, laptop or TV fast and free.
It's successful because it's mindless, people can just pull something up and consume content. If they start pushing more unskippable ads, or requiring subscriptions or accounts to view, their viewership would go way down and people would move on to next easier thing.
And that's not even getting into the content part, where the stuff you want is probably on like 15 different services and you're either gonna pay through the nose for something you barely need or you'll have to miss a whole bunch of things because it's less of a hassle that way.
Yeah, it's a lot easier when almost everything can be found on a couple of sites for free, where you don't need an account to view most videos and where everything is about as predictable as it can be.
There's a very low bar for anyone in the world to watch YouTube with a handheld device and an internet connection. What am I missing?
I suppose it's their ad program and fast-acting content ID system that juice it - that'd be the hard part to get right.
X has a lot of video content too - why not present it better in a video-focused version? Get rid of the "X" branding though - it's not a rating. Maybe "Y"?
Micropayments should be tied into all compensation now. x402 as well for monetization.
Perhaps if Soundcloud did video it'd be a challenger and there's one area Soundcloud lacks but should be able to capitalize on - music videos as uploaded by artists themselves.
- a third person had to step in and create a search bar for it right here on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47655392
- i am amazed i dont see a single person complaining about this at any conference, at any google IO event, i live 10000 miles away from california but if I could barge in on a Google IO with Sundar Pichai giving a keynote, I would totally ask him why they broke search
YT's search functions are nerfed very deliberately. YouTube's main purpose is to shove content at the user that we don't want. Ads or no ads, we're supposed to consume unwanted content at a far higher volume than the stuff we actually sought out.
This is the same no matter what the platform or the medium. It's long been a paradigm for scheduling television shows, that the viewers are too lazy to switch channels away from that great show they loved, and so they can "tailgate" a really awful show after a highly-rated one. Radio stations aren't playing what the listeners want to hear, they're shoving sounds into our ears as dictated by the labels and the media companies, and so forth.
YouTube (and YouTube Music, especially with its extremely sticky "AutoPlay" switch) are shoveling suggestions at us, and counting on our laziness, to just mindlessly click the first thing that comes under our mouse.
I'm obviously all-in on YT and Music as media players, and I use their Playlist features extensively, but it is completely impossible to organize Playlists in a way that will help me find content again! It is completely impossible for me to create a nice, uniform set of Playlists across the months and years. I often create time-and-date sensitive playlists, i.e. I want to find it again in mid-April next year, but that all basically falls by the wayside. I often impulsively create a Playlist based on some theme I envision in the moment, abandon it, and I never find it again. YouTube and Music count on that behavior and they will never show us our own Playlists in suggested stuff, or in searches unless we deliberately hammer on it. YouTube wants us to find "Community Playlists" and stuff that you don't want, but is otherwise hyped or algorithm'd to appear in front of our eyeballs.
disable_minimize()Of course, the preceding paragraph could be re-written in many different ways.
Because it would be shocking to me if there were Youtubers who truly believed that having (or not having) new subscribers had no impact on the algorithm.
On desktop, the homepage also has subscriptions on the side, with an indicator that someone has a new video.
Photonicinduction
The very best of what youtube can offer, to me. Pick any video.
I get why you did it, but you sorta want the sweet cake without any carbs in it.
covered in terms of conference videos,
then you can listen to dj mixes.
YouTube is simply goated - no other platform comes to the versatility you can consume in terms of long-form content.
(raises hand)
YT replaced TV channel for me, its recent push to force AI into everything, its broken copyright policy is destroying the same empire it created.
And stop recommending me the same videos over and over , gah
The upside of that is that if you add the correct script to the ad blocker extension, you'll never see a youtube reel for the rest of your life, which HEAVILY improves the experience on youtube.
this is the filter list I use: https://github.com/i5heu/ublock-hide-yt-shorts
YouTube for the most part just serves what you post, does minimal content moderation, stuff a dumb insurance ad on the front (of the long-form content) that looks like a dumb insurance ad, and then does it for everyone else. I mean, sure, they could do better. But really if the world of amateur video content was all YouTube it would be a better place.
Time to stop thinking corporations will suddenly start policing themsleves.
You literally have to intentionally click a short video or use the shorts tab to see any YouTube short.
I sometimes wonder if other people get other UIs than I do. There's technically nothing stopping them from 'tailoring' the UI for different people.
We'll show you fewer Shorts on Home
Not "no more", but "fewer". Which means you don't get a choice, YouTube will still shove them down your throat.
If you don’t want to watch a short, don’t click on it. Just like if you don’t want to watch a video about a certain topic, you don’t click on it.
Seeing that they exist is in no way an inconvenience or annoyance. You’re supposed to just watch what you want.
It’s extremely easy to never click on a Short. I don’t understand the emotional response to these things at all. I’m sure there’s tons of normal videos you don’t want to watch that’s you simply scroll past that don’t elicit emotion whatsoever.
Like yes I can hide them all using ublock on desktop and morphe on Android, but that the fact I have to do it to avoid them is because they're pushing shorts harder as of late, it used to also be pushed but not as much from my personal experience.
Because the people you subscribe to are making those shorts.
Your subscription page shows you all the most recent videos from the channels you’re subscribed to.
That in no way is shoving anything down your throat. You’re just supposed to watch what you want to watch. You’re not expected to click and watch every video in your subscription feed.
And unfortunately many YouTubers who do make normal, good content also make shorts because it's incredibly algorithm-friendly, so there's no avoiding it unless you blacklist every creator that dares make shorts.
Of course, I then see one row of videos and then the damn "YouTube Playable" section so maybe the moral of the story is that the main page is unusable outright.
An “entire section” isn’t “shoving” something down your throat. You literally don’t even have to process that part of the site with your brain.
When you go to Amazon are you just completely overwhelmed by all the stuff they’re “shoving down your throat”? I mean they have tons of sections on the home page. Are you actually bothered by that or are do you simply search for what you want like everyone else?
In their ongoing fight against yt-dlp and others i can already not watch videos using VPNs.
Adblockers has made most tech people unaware of the enshittification of most web services. For most normal people when they eventually make this change it will not affect them at all.
They're not in loss making business after all.
I don't know if many of you remember the olden days of Youtube, when it wasn't lead by corporate greed, and before it was infested by greedy abysmal shitty people - When profits weren't the driving force behind content creation.
Whenever I see content creators like that on Youtube right now I just wish them the best, and if they have a platform currently that supports them financially, well good for them. I still remember the 2018 fiasco when the Ads bubble burst because of the bridge incident, and lots of them didn't know what to do cause the revenue was very shit for years and the future looked bleak.
My favorite channels thread: - Watch Wes Work: Car Mechanic but super funny - Super EyePatch Wolf and Worm Girl: Niche Horror Video Games and Topics. - Lots of Japanese Drawing Channels - Devaslife: Japanese Developer and Creator of Inkdrop - Miziziziz and countless game developers that want to show their games and tutorials. - Acerola: Best Youtube Content on Graphics Development - jdh: game development in C and super amazing content truly - Ethoslab: He'll always have a spot on my youtube world
You can't say "kill", you have to say "unalive" or "took their life" or shit like that. You can't say "rape", you have to say "SA". You can't say "porn", everyone called it "corn". Apparently you can't even say 16, because I saw a YouTuber say "61 backwards" when talking about a creep on the internet. I remember one YouTuber censored "damn". It's one thing when it's like a comedy video, but what bothers is when you have "true crime" YouTubers who end up censoring half the video because it turns out that you really can't talk about murder without saying the word "murder", or "killed", and in the case of serial killers "rape".
I can watch Law and Order: SVU that uses all those words, and that was on network TV, the one where the FCC could actively block bad stuff.
So at this point, YouTube has become a pretty sanitized place filled with sanitized content, even more sanitized than network TV, which is fine, but it's sort of the opposite of what I liked about it from the get-go, and it has gradually become less appealing to me. I understand why these creators are afraid to use the actual words (advertisers and the like), but I have found a lot of content to be pretty bland as a result.
Part of why I got into YouTube as a teenager and onward was specifically because creators were allowed to act candidly. They would say curse words and talk about things that interested them. It was cool.
if they just wanted to express themselves, they could.
I grew up as a guy with stairs in my house and part of why I got into the internet pretty early is because I found the fact that people were willing to express themselves using non-sanitized language to be appealing. I liked Something Awful, I liked Newgrounds, I liked YTMND, and I liked them specifically because they weren't safe for TV.
Different time I suppose. At least Something Awful is still around.
Honestly, my favorite channel is probably BBC to watch snippets of classic BBC Earth series narrated by David Attenborough. I'm pretty sure I could get them through HBO Max, which I believe is the US streaming that has distribution rights for BBC Earth, but it's convenient to get stuff like this all from one place and pretty much everything has a YouTube channel.
Things don't sound completely rosy for creators who want to actually make money from it, but it does seem like they manage to get by. From the perspective of a viewer, they absolutely deserve this.
To be fair: not everything is shite and Youtube is my favorite social media (especially for discovering new music), but I noticed a big drop in quality from one day to the other a couple of years ago.