It is not just about youtube. The whole internet is bloated with ads right now, and the vast majority of them quite the opposite of discrete.
I just cannot browse the internet without adblocker, it is too slow, but more importantly too distracting. I could count the times that I have found an internet ad interesting in my lifetime using half the fingers of one hand. Personalised or not, the vast majority is useless, badly made, that just takes processing time both for the computer and my brain.
I will not, and probably cannot, pay and subscribe to any random website I am gonna visit to remove ads to make the experience tolerable, when I can just block the ads. If a website says that I have to disable the adblocker to view it, and I cannot go around it, 99% of the times I do not visit it, I do not care. I pay the people I want to support directly and that's it. I use bandcamp to buy the music I like directly. I subscribe to patreon to the ones that I feel they bring value to my life. But for the occasional or ephemeral video or entertainment, I will just as easily live without, as the disruption ads cause is worse than not viewing that content.
I believe it is my right to adjust my browsing experience by affecting how websites are rendered in my browser to a degree I find reasonable, as well as from my side what data tracking I allow, which is already a huge compromise for me (I would rather not allow js by default in most websites). If a website blocks this, I am not going to sacrifise my experience and I am not interested in browsing it.
> I believe it is my right to adjust my browsing experience by affecting how websites are rendered in my browser to a degree I find reasonable, as well as from my side what data tracking I allow, which is already a huge compromise for me (I would rather not allow js by default in most websites).
Agree completely. I know people who are fine with watching ads to support the content creators and I agree. The creators should be compensated but Google are far too agressive with their ads.
Being able to manipulate my own machine and what I want to view is entirely up to me. This can't be infringed.
There is always the option today to block from the client side, but I can see this changing if there's enough money involved.
Oh, I just recognized a specific swypey mistake that I've seen myself make lots of times. But maybe they'd also happen on regular text prediction too? My sister in law regularly uses voice input, and her Whatsapp messages have totally different types of errors.
> Agree completely. I know people who are fine with watching ads to support the content creators and I agree. The creators should be compensated but Google are far too agressive with their ads.
The part I dislike about this is that they will demonetize a video for content reasons, but still show ads on it.
I also don't know how it works with YouTube Premium. If I have Premium and I watch a creator, does YouTube pay them some tiny % of my subscription fee to offset the ads that I'm no longer watching?
> If I have Premium and I watch a creator, does YouTube pay them some tiny % of my subscription fee to offset the ads that I'm no longer watching?
I'm not a content creator but Google do claim that a small % of the pool goes to the creators you watch, I guess kind of like a Spotify model.
> Will creators still be paid with YouTube Premium?
Yes. In fact, YouTube Premium gives a secondary revenue stream for creators in addition to what you're already earning today through ads.
> I also don't know how it works with YouTube Premium. If I have Premium and I watch a creator, does YouTube pay them some tiny % of my subscription fee to offset the ads that I'm no longer watching?
>I just cannot browse the internet without adblocker, it is too slow, but more importantly too distracting
not saying this applies to you but might it be that ads are distracting enough that they would be an actual accessibility problem affecting people with ADHD - if so is not allowing people to block ads likely to run into legal issues?
Some websites just keep throwing an enormous number of ads into your face to the the extent you start losing consciousness why you came here in the first place.
On computer, you still able to use an AdBlock but on mobile, I suffer terribly, not only because I could not disable ads but because on some sites while you are reading an article a random ad video that took about half of the screen keeps playing and scrolling down with you, even clicking the X doesn’t work most of the time but generally triggers an external link. At the bottom of the page, you start reading “best job offers in XYZ” where this XYZ is your city name deduced from your IP address, the thumbnail, as you might expect, is a “s_x_” girl lying on a bed :(
I know, free content should be supported by ads but I believe this is not the way to do it.
On iOS you can install AdGuard in Safari (or pay for a few of the other ad-blocker extensions) or install Brave which has an ad-blocker built-in. Both work well in my experience.
On iOS you can install browser extensions from firefox and chrome to the Orion browser.
I've found it a few month back in this threat here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34562553, it is working sufficiently so far, seems even a bit faster than safari to me, too.
If you don't mind using Opera mobile, their ad blocking is very good, at least for the sites I frequent (including youtube). They're Chinese owned now, but I don't ever use it for banking, shopping or social media. For those I use Firefox.
- I start the video, an ad is shown within 30 secs.
- I fast forward a few minutes, the SAME ad is shown again.
- I jump to anywhere on the timeline, the SAME ad is shown again.
At least show me something that is relevant, like facebook does. The ads there reflect what I usually look for. On YT, none of the ads are relevant to me, ever.
That's fair. Because also probably the people the advertisers want to reach MOST are exactly the people who have the spare money (and willingness to spend it) to shell out for YT Premium.
But yeah I'd pay to get rid of all the "this video is sponsored by brilliant/nordVPN/whatever".
You mean embedded native stuff? No, but SponsorBlock does and I use both. YT Premium pays creators for YT views and the analytics don't appreciably differentiate whether you watched an ad or skipped it, so I'm pretty comfortable with the two.
(The apps don't work with SponsorBlock and that does drag, but I mostly don't watch native-advertising videos on my TV so whatever.)
Repitition reinforces the ads, just like in other 'learning', advertisers will always want us to retain their ads, I can't see the 'waterboard them with annoying ads' technique going away in any country that Capitalism manages to keep its talons embedded in.
Yeah, but I will never put winter tires on my car, because it's useless where I live. So, maybe, the targeting was subpar. Also, repetition reinforces me to enable ublock again.
> I'm not paying for anything until they remove the "this is the bubble we have prepared for you" recommendation algorithm.
Indeed, and what bothers me most is that it is "one" bubble. I wish there was a selection of tags to choose what mood I am in. Sometimes I only want math and science suggestions, sometimes I want to watch 3Dprinting or FreeCAD video's and other times I just want to discover some music. But Youtube mixes these three different moods together (even though I never play music on Youtube in the morning, nor watch math video's in the late evening).
Please Youtube, let me choose my current 'bubble'.
The ios app lets you do that at least. At the top of the Home Screen I can choose “podcast”, “history” etc though within those it’s still recommendation based.
Or other YouTube clients with ads disabled :) There is even a SmartTV YouTube App that works like a charm. It even skips as blocks in the video itself. Only casting then uses the original app with ads.
Edit:// as long as I would need 2 premium accounts for all my active devices I don't accept that as a real solution
Vanced has essentially been disabled recently, unable to play anything. I don't know if YouTube is going on a murdering spree of everything that threatens ads on the platform.
On mobile it's annoying yes, but there is always a working solution around. On TV however the app "SmartTubeNext" seems to update faster than YouTube patches. (Afaik there are multiple Vanced clones like revanced in case you are using the original)
We were watching Eurovision singing contest the other day from YT and my gawd was that annoying. Adds in the middle of every song, volume being cranked up for the adds, and as a icing on the cake, probably due to bug somewhere, the playback went to pause after each ad (iPhone airplaying to AppleTV).
I wonder if those devices simply looked at the volume and said, "If it's high [perhaps for a few seconds at a time], then it's probably an ad". Seems like a pretty good heuristic.
I had one of those but it was built into our TV, a Magnavox. It relied on a small black frame that local broadcasters used to insert their ads. National broadcaster like NBC would stream to their local affiliates. And the stream would have blank spaces to an insert their own ads. It’s very fast ,0.1s, that your eye would see briefly but to smart enough electronics was very perceptible. Once the commercial block was detected volume goes down. And the subsequent black frame turns it back up.
"Night mode", if it is present, should also do this to a lesser extent. I am grateful for this feature in movies where light chit-chat is interrupted by window-shattering explosion sounds.
TV ads (almost) never interrupted the flow of the show you were watching, because the show was specifically designed around the ad breaks. Radio ads always came between songs.
YouTube is now just sticking ads in any old where in videos. The middle of a song. The middle of a sentence. It's revolting, and in many cases it ruins the content you're actually trying to watch.
You know, if someone would constantly burst into rooms shouting at the top of their lungs for you to give them money, we'd beat them with a wrench. Yet this same behavior is not only tolerated and excused, but encouraged, when done in the name of business profits.
I'd rephrase that to "and there are people who want to debate whether blocking advertisements is morally defensible" as this is not so much an indictment of "society" as it is an exposition of the moral bankruptcy of the advertising industry. The question should not be whether blocking ads is morally defensible but the other way around, whether exposing yourself and others to "modern" advertising is defensible - to which the answer is a wholehearted "Hell No".
Give me a catalogue full of ads like the Computer Shopper [1] magazine of yore and I'll sing praise of the advertisers who clearly showed what they sold for which prices. I actually bought the thing - imagine that, paying money for a telephone book-sized magazine filled with nothing but ads - because it was useful in showing what the market had to offer. A modern-day Computer Shopper would be filled with...
...lifestyle-related drivel
...virtue signalling diversity statements without any relation to whatever product is sold
...celebrities doing things they only do because they get millions for it
...clearly stupid clueless men who only make it through their day because they have women and girls to correct their stupid mistakes, bad choices and silly habits
...some more diversity statements but this time with celebrities
...etc.
Now I understand I'm not really part of the target market the advertisers are trying to brainwash and that the nothing-but-a-list-of-products-with-prices style of advertising does not appeal to everyone. Find some other way of reaching your target market which shares the simplicity and honesty of this type of advertising, stop shouting, stop the brainwashing, get rid of the subliminal messaging, ditch the lifestyle drivel, just quit being bottom feeders and get back to advertising products and prices, no more and no less. Unless you want to be beaten with a wrench that is but in that case you better start wearing helmets and toques.
Eurovision is basically a big tourism add wrapped in a sell of the cheapest, dullest more forgettable pop songs available. Watching publicity is the whole experience
Yeah, I think Facebook has the better algorithms for knowing what I'm interested in.
I use Instagram more than Facebook but quite a few times I've seen ads for things that have caught my attention. I've even bought something because of one.
I've never bought anything by looking at a Google ad. They are almost always something I know about already. What good is an ad for something I know about?
This is how brand advertising works, it's psychological 'trickery' to try and associate that brand with what people find positive, such associations influence us when we make buying choices or when we react to other people's buying choices.
For many years I thought I was immune to such ads, but really I think we are all affected by them -- increased desire for 'things', with reduced happiness for anyone who can't or won't buy them.
> This is how brand advertising works, it's psychological 'trickery' to try and associate that brand with what people find positive, such associations influence us when we make buying choices or when we react to other people's buying choices.
Not sure how cursing at highly repetitive ads that aren’t relevant to me is a considered “positive”.
So far YouTube's ads haven't convinced me to invest - much less invest with those advertised companies; frankly, I would probably go to my bank if I were to get into investing, I mean I already trust them with my money.
The ad I most frequently get on YouTube - we’re talking three times per video, every other video - is for a shingles vaccine targeted at adults over 60.
No amount of spaced repetition is going to make me, an adult decades under the age of 60, talk to my doctor about that shingles vaccine. This cannot possibly be a truly cost-efficient ad platform.
While it is irritating the frequency of them, personally I prefer ads that aren't relevant. I'll spend my money when I want and I don't like to be manipulated by an ad. Plus I like to feel that online marketers know as little about my preferences as possible and are wasting their advertising budget just showing me useless products and services. I'm looking at you Grammarly...
It’s weird that I didn’t realize this for long. Chances are you are probably in market for presumably irrelevant products, it’s only that a lot of us don’t find those topics entertaining.
I wouldn’t mind a nice representative calmly onboarding me with an exciting new middle eastern investment opportunities, I might even enjoy listening to those with a glass of tap water on one hand. That of course is because it is an extremely relevant topic to me /s
The only point i would add is the long ads that require an action to skip (30+ minutes).
More recently I have also been getting clear scams as ads and no amount of reporting can get rid of them.
These are the reasons I spent the time blocking the ads on all devices. Maybe Google should fix their ads to make them less awful instead of starting the death of Youtube.
Ad-blocking also gives you similar if not more extra security to anti-virus software, with fewer downsides (faster not slower). I'm afraid the ad ecosystem is so big that occasionally, threats slip through.
This may be true on random-site-X on the internet, but is not true on sites like YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, Facebook, etc that run their own first-party ad platforms.
YouTubes "first-party ad platform" is delivering some of the worst ads on the whole internet.
It's not only the big-boobed characters promoting mobile games, there are (video) ads for pyramid and other "get rich quick" schemes, conspiracy theories (government will force everyone to become transgender!) and whatnot.
They don't give just the tiniest bit of a shit for all of this, as long as they are earning money with it.
I have heard of their “system”, they auction ad space out in real time with a bunch a descriptors for the ad buyers who then bid for the space. Google really doesn’t give a crap who wins it or if it matches your interests/needs. Advertisers are free to advertise to anyone as long as they win the bid.
>…there are (video) ads for pyramid and other "get rich quick" schemes…
Oh my dog. Before I set up Invidious to ensure my experience on iPad and such could be ad free, the one that really shocked me is one of the two ads that would show up mid-roll for a creator I watched regularly was SIXTY SIX MINUTES in length. Yes, an hour and six minutes! I can’t imagine what that must cost, but clearly whatever they were selling must cover the costs of a 66-minute ad well enough!
I've been wondering what the purpose of those super-long ads is for some time, but now it suddenly occurred to me: they're for unattended youtube players.
Plenty of shops, waiting rooms, lounges, bars, etc have a TV which is simply tuned to a youtube playlist. Whoever is issuing those ads is counting on that the operators of those TV's for whatever reason (either because they don't care, don't notice, or don't have access to the controls) don't skip them.
Not entirely. I sat through a 12 minute ad once. We could have skipped it after 5 seconds. But it was a charming video of a lady cooking a hamburger and I rather enjoyed watching it. I wish more ads were like that
I do not! It was years ago. And unfortunately there is no tracking of ads, I wanted a link to that video too. You can't even back up and re-watch an ad!
I've seen it said that newsfeeds/ads/etc. feed you what they think you will engage with, so you may want to wonder why you're seeing that type of content. I've never seen anything of the sort on any large tech platform, and I'm probably in an appropriate demographic to be recommended that stuff.
Those algorithms tend to be "people who liked X also liked Y", which is very prone to false positives for people who don't fit conventional stereotypes.
For example, someone who watches the Forgotten Weapons channel on Youtube might get recommended far-right conspiracy videos, because people who like guns often like far-right politics. They might also get recommended Scott Manley and Greg's Airplanes and Automobiles because all three have deep dives into interesting historical technology.
Ideally, there would be more manual knobs for communicating one's preferences about such things to recommendation algorithms.
Relatedly, easily the highest item on my wishlist for YouTube features is algorithm customizability. Half the time I'm recommended the same 5 channels, while the other half I'm recommended amazing videos from fantastic smaller YouTube channels.
Being able to at least switch between some presets for the algorithm would be amazing.
I think it's more the lack of other analytics data, due to uBlock Origin and a PiHole in my network, that they fall back to those ads. Maybe I'd have some nice ads for cooking supplies if I were to allow tracking, not sure.
I almost fell for a scam yesterday from an instagram ad. There was an ad for fun printed workout shorts for only €4. I added a couple different prints and was about to pay when I noticed the URL was neehd dot com and the site title was some other random word. I couldn't find any reference to either name online and went back to instagram. The VERY NEXT AD was for an identical site with a different random 5 letter url. I reported both ads and now neehd com is "no longer available". Very glad I didn't put any payment details into the site. If they employ people to vet ads full time they should have easily been able to catch those ads before it was shown to a user. I have seen ads for those shorts non stop for a few weeks before I finally tapped the ad to see how much they were.
Indeed. Some years ago a fairly well-known news site here in Norway had their ad platform hacked, and it started serving a payload that exploited a vulnerability to infect a machine visiting the site with zero user interaction and zero visibility.
The payload would then proceed to hijack the browser and intercept sessions to the most popular online bank, allowing it to redirect funds behind the scenes without alerting the user.
That's the point when I realized ad blockers aren't a nice-to-have, but an essential protection element.
Performance and security may be my primary reasons for using an ad-blocker, but I must also admit that I would not remove the blocker even if those issues were addressed. On the rare occasion that I have used a computer without an ad blocker, I have found that advertising is so intrusive that I would rather not use the web.
I run a PiHole in the cloud and VPN into it from my phone. Does the job of blocking ads pretty damn well.
What often ends up happening though is there will be a big empty box where the ad is supposed to be. And it's outright appalling how many ads they try to shove onto your screen. Every paragraph is separated by an ad.
> the vast majority of them quite the opposite of discrete.
This is the main point IMO. When you have a printed newspaper or magazine you are not annoyed by the ads.
If we had ads that (1) do not move, (2) are not modal/do not pop up, (3) do not track you outside the website, (4) do not take MB's of data I would be willing to tolerate them and they could even be helpful.
Youtube has become unwatchable without ad blockers. It used to be better than TV, now it is worse and you cannot skip them.
> I will not, and probably cannot, pay and subscribe to any random website I am gonna visit to remove ads to make the experience tolerable, when I can just block the ads.
Okay, but how do you square that with the fact that hosting content costs money? Are the people and companies which provide the content you look at not allowed to earn money to keep the servers running and the sysadmins fed?
Producing television shows also costs money, but no-one forces me to watch the ads there. I can change channel, or skip past them if recorded, or just leave the room while they're on.
I would have no problem with ads if they weren't so obnoxious. They cause the page layout to shift as they load in, they block the loading of actual page content, they play sounds, play videos, pop up over the content i'm trying to read. Advertising doesn't have to be like that and that's why i block it.
By not caring about how any random website/app/whatever will survive, and only caring about the ones that add value to me.
I am not saying it makes total sense or is perfectly thought through, but I am asking myself for example, how would it be like if I never used/watched this service/app/creator/whatever ever again? Would I feel I lose something, would I care about it? I am not saying just finding some similar alternative, but about the experience itself regardless of alternatives.
Maybe others think differently, but for me, a vast majority of what I may watch on the internet is not really adding value to me and could just easily do without. To the ones that do add value, I support them, but in reasonable ways. If I do not feel it is reasonable, then I do not, and sad truth is that, for me at least, ads as implemented in most places create a bigger distraction than my incentive to support.
One example, I did not mind facebook's ads until facebook got over aggressive in sending me "suggestions" for various meme groups. It was unusable for me after that point. Then, I decided to use FB purity to get read of all ads and suggestions. If facebook had not done that, then I would have continued fine with its normal ads, one of the few ads that I have actually found useful was in facebook. But the alternative to removing the ads was not just seeing the ads after the change, the alternative was to stop using facebook (I have a very curated home page in facebook and unfollow 99% of my friends there) which is sadly not an option right now due to various social factors. Or maybe disabling the facebook feed itself somehow.
Another example is a supposedly private search engine. It had a banner to disable ads to support it, which I tried but then I just had to scroll down to see the first real results after the ads every time I was searching for something, which was non-sense and very annoying. I tried to find a way to donate or sth but there was no such option, so I gave up trying to support that. Maybe I move to another private search engine some point. I am not sure if I should just tolerate scrolling down to see the results everytime, but if there is a private search engine that uses ads in a better way I would be fine using that.
And as much as it is weird in our times, there are websites that do not depend on ads. For example I use bandcamp to buy the music I like, and with buying my music from there I support both the musicians and the website/service itself.
Other than that, I do subscribe/support/donate/buy services/apps etc that add value to me, even if I am not required to do so to use them freely and non-disruptively. I have even paid for games years after I actually played them through pirate versions, because before I did not have the money and I felt they deserved it. I guess if people do more or less something like that, according to each one's financial abilities, everybody will be happy or sth, and things that offer value to an adequate amount of people will be ok.
On mobile YouTube right now I see two unskippable ads before every video. How long before some genius needs to juice his numbers this quarter and come up with the bright idea of three unskippable ads? Google made over $250 billion in 2021, $30 billion of that is thought to come from YouTube, can someone explain to me what is wrong with this status quo? If blocking a subset of users is such a good idea, why isn't Google rolling it out to everyone today?
To the bean counters who seem to have overwhelmed Google, losing a few users might seem like a dog losing some fleas. They are out of ideas for growth. Once blitz scaling has reached the limits of user acquisition the only play left to juice the numbers seems to be “boil the frog”, going to war with their Oort cloud of free users, pay up or else. Are the c-suite types at Google aware that this is exactly the mindset that will make their decline into irrelevance inevitable?
Elon Musk inadvertently turned Twitter into a howling wasteland in a few short months, which shows what happens when you boil the user frog too quickly. Imagine how Twitter would look today if Elon instead doubled down on making Twitter the best user experience, offering users tools to make Twitter more relevant, making it an unmissable service for users, and in turn unmissable for advertisers? But instead he pulled the lever all the way from utopia to hellscape, attempting to shake down users to restore some functionality to a clearly degraded product. Enshitifying (thanks Cory Doctorow) the user experience is not a compelling reason to subscribe.
Here's a radical idea: customer acquisition and retention by offering the most compelling product.
I'm not against advertising per se, I’m against being shaken down to regain a user experience that should be the default. Here are two examples of successful advertising models:
1. Lex Friedman does an ad read at the beginning of his podcast. It’s intentionally skippable, I skip it 90% of the time. But when I'm busy with bread dough on my hands or whatever, I'm still hearing the ads, which are mostly repeat offerings anyway. Advertising is not always appropriate, eg at a kids birthday party or showing a video in a lecture. The lesson: MAKE IT SKIPPABLE!
2. Inserts into shows / product placement, like on VFX Artists React. These seem harder for a behemoth to monetise but I like these because I know that the actual creators are getting paid. Youtube doesn't want to deal with creators with anything closer than a dashboard. This is not the end users fault, it’s not the content creators fault, it’s a symptom of absentee capitalism. Youtube should invest in creators and form true partnerships. The lesson: INVEST IN DEALING FAIRLY WITH HUMANS!
I’m not going to pay, I will continue to avoid ads but watch them occasionally. I’m going to keep playing the game of whack-a-mole finding software / hardware solutions. And when a competitor comes along with their slider set more towards user friendliness I’m going to jump ship.
> Google made over $250 billion in 2021, $30 billion of that is thought to come from YouTube, can someone explain to me what is wrong with this status quo?
YouTube might (but probably doesn't) make $30 billion in revenue. It certainly doesn't make $30 billion in profit. It's questionable if it even breaks even, and even if it does it's certainly nowhere near paid back the amount of money that has been spent keeping it afloat post acquisition.
> If blocking a subset of users is such a good idea, why isn't Google rolling it out to everyone today?
Because testing something is pretty much always a good idea.
> Here's a radical idea: customer acquisition and retention by offering the most compelling product.
That's not a radical idea, it's a bad one if you lose money on most customers and are hoping to make it up at scale. Ad blocking users are unquestionably money losers for Google.
> And when a competitor comes along with their slider set more towards user friendliness I’m going to jump ship.
What competitor do you think is coming that will be willing to (at a very conservative estimate) set fire to $75 billion+ for a decade to build this competitor, and the investors who loan that $75 billion dollars on a very risky ten year bet not expect a very significant ROI in exchange?
YouTube objectively should never have existed - it was extremely predatorily priced in terms of lowered ad load or subscription charging to actually exist as a business, and Google kept it going to scare competitors away. If a competitor actually comes it will be significantly, significantly more monetised than YouTube is.
> If blocking a subset of users is such a good idea, why isn't Google rolling it out to everyone today?
There's a bunch of reasons to do an experiment with a small percentage of users first, and to do a gradual rollout.
First, they don't actually know for sure that this works, since users are unpredictable. You need an experiment to see how they react now and in the longer term. Do all the impacted users just immediately switch to a different ad blocker that isn't getting detected? No point in rolling this out further until that is fixed. Do all of those users churn out entirely, rather than some of them disabling the adblocker or subscribing to Premium? Then there's a business decision to be made, and they didn't have data for it earlier.
Second, there might be technical issues that make the implementation harmful. For example maybe the JS code causes crashes for legit users on a browser you didn't test, or something. You'd like to contain the damage to just members of the experimental group, not all users of that browser.
Third, even if they know this will be a beneficial change, they don't know how beneficial. The people who proposed and implemented the project want to show the impact (an increase of X million in ads revenue, extra Y thousand Premium subscribers, Z reduction in serving costs, whatever their KPI is). The people who funded the team want to know whether they actually got a return on the investment, and whether they should continue staffing further work to improve coverage, etc.
> Here's a radical idea: customer acquisition and retention by offering the most compelling product
Isn’t that what they’re doing? This thread is full of people who are arguing that they cannot possibly be expected to stop watching YouTube, which sounds like they’re doing a good job attracting both an audience and compelling content. There’s a whole internet full of content out there, tons of options for creators to get paid, but even in a thread full of people saying they hate Google’s business model it seems like few people are willing to give up using YouTube so they must be doing something right.
You've hit on the reason I think the Brave token is such a great idea (https://brave.com/brave-rewards/). I know it's en vogue to trash gimmicky cryptocurrencies, and to be honest I don't care how this gets implemented. The concept is great: a shared, fungible way to easily support random websites one visits, and control the kinds of ads one accepts. If sites had a little tip jar which I could easily tap to avoid ads, I'd use it. There's just too much friction today in supporting sites, and all of them want a subscription.
The whole point of advertisements is that the person pushing them doesn't earn anything from them - but rather, force-feeds information about the existence of their product to the public. Now, instead of ruining our public space with horrible billboards and kitschy flashing lights, they ruin our digital space with horrible pop-ups and kitschy lust-provoking videos.
I don't care about those who run ads, nor those who allow ad companies to run ads on their content. If you earn money through ads, that's your problem, not mine, and it's not my responsibility to watch them. Ads are fundamentally intrusive, and pretending like the society at large has some kind of "responsibility" towards those who earn money from ads is laughable.
That was the original intention of HashCash, the inspiration to Bitcoin. Antispam micropayments to add some trivial level of cost to online interactions to make scale unaffordable.
This looks like a good idea indeed. I would not mind something like that, as long as some reasonable level of control from the user side exists. I will try it in my mobile as I use brave anyway there.
> The whole internet is bloated with ads right now
Internet? I think you mean everything. The whole everything is bloated with ads right now. Look around you, I bet you can see at least a dozen brand names without even leaving your chair.
People who work in marketing and ads should quit their jobs if they care at all about society, but of course they don't or they wouldn't be in marketing and advertising. Alternatively, we should just stop putting up with their bullshit because they have a long history of abusing every inch they are given.
Since I live in countries other than my own, there's a 0% chance that any given ad is relevant to me. Chances are it's in a language I don't speak or for a product I'm not eligible for, much less something I'd actually want.
This works out great because my brain doesn't get so distracted by ads, even physical billboard ads. But at the same time I use an ad-blocker to avoid wasted screen real estate.
I think the core issue is:
* People don't like ads, because ads suck
* Youtube offers premium, an ad-less experience
Never have I seen self-entitled people so furious as when YT requests they buy premium in order to remove ads. What, should YT be hosted for free without ads and without a subscription?
I get that ads suck and companies suck, but self-entitled people suck too; most of us here are devs and we get paid because our company has to make money _somehow_.
YT users have two great options for paying for their access, dealing with ads or paying a subscription. They refuse either option and instead are furious that YT doesn't offer itself completely for free.
I don't like ads and I don't mind paying. What I don't like is paying for an ad-free experience and my data continuing to get mined. I consider companies entitled if they demand to have both my data and my money
> YT users have two great options for paying for their access, dealing with ads or paying a subscription.
I wouldn't say it offers 2 great options. The ad-funded offering is a non-starter given the reality of its ad market. The paid option sounds great, but if the goal is to finance the creators you enjoy most, it doesn't work. The success of Nebula, plus several of YouTube's policy changes or lack thereof, imply that YouTube doesn't actually care, it's just driven by greed.
Youtube is part of the reason I have an adblock. I do not watch youtube on my phone because of the ads.
Reasonable ads would be fine. 10-15 seconds of ad on a short video, 30 seconds on a longer one. A choice to watch a 3 minute ad to watch a 2 hour video uninterrupted. I kind of long for the banners of days gone by.
But that's not what is going on. They'll play an ad in the middle of a music video. ad after ad after ad. And I get ads in videos because they are "sponsored". It has been designed to be as intrusive as possible to try to extort you out of money. And honestly, I despite them for this. If they can't possibly let music play for 4 minutes without an interruption or two, they can't possibly care if I'm watching for "free" nor care about the folks making their content.
As another commenter said, roads are paid for with taxes, usually a special road tax collected from car-owning citizens, sometimes even from the specific area the road is in. I hope you pay your taxes.
What a ridiculous comparison, though. Like, really? If I were to use the same logic surely I could just walk into your own house and just live there free of charge. You cook my meals and clean up for me too, thanks. Oh wait, that's absurd.
What people mean when they say all these things is that, "I can easily access things I want for free, so why would I ever pay?"
Yes some people give voluntarily through donations or Patreon, but it's a tiny amount of the actual number of people who derive satisfaction from the content.
The best solution for someone who hates ads is a subscription model. The thing that bothers me is that publishers still collect massive amounts of data and sell it, and some continue to have advertising or product placement. Give me ads or give me a completely untracked experience for a fee. Don't do something in between and claim that it's ad-free.
Any website that doesn't want me able to choose what I do on my own computer with the information they've freely given me is welcome to move to a different protocol that requires a locked down operating system that forces display of their content in the manner that they dictate. Until then, they can choose to stop freely sending me information or accept I'm going to use information on my own computer however I want (short of redistributing it).
Bandcamp is interesting and I am considering it and cancel Spotify. How do you go about discovering music? I use Spotify for not only listening to my artists but for music discovery too.
Oof this is a great question, it actually deserves a thread of its own tbh. I do not think I have figured that out completely in a satisfactory way. Bandcamp is not that great at that as in providing a feed of songs suggested to you by your preferences, it does not have "autoplay", and searching for content in a more classic way there is messy. But it does provide a list of suggestions under each album, with a list of albums that a number of people who own that album also own, which is quite decent. It is particularly useful if what you want to find something that is similar to style to something you like. I find it quite reliable actually in finding similar stuff, probably because buying an album is quite strong measure to use to correlate albums.
Also, I find quite a few genre-specific compilations in bandcamp (and elsewhere), and this is probably my favourite way to discover new bands, because usually compilations include decent bands and some of their strongest tracks, so you do not get lost as much. And as far as internet is concerned, other places I find new inspiration are genre specific forums, pages etc, and actually pages/accounts of the bands themselves (they often suggest bands they themselves like - bandcamp has even an option for artists to recommend material from others to their audience, which is actually quite nice).
In general, I would say that discovering new music in bandcamp is possible, but it is rather an active process (you look into an album you like and browse through the suggested albums, play each of them etc) and takes time. In contrast, with dj youtube it is easier because it is predominantly passive, by automatically playing new suggested tracks and once in a while you hear sth that clicks. I admit that I have discovered some of my favourite bands through dj youtube this way. I have not used spotify but I assume it is somewhat similar?
Tbh I appreciate the active process, in the sense that I feel that the experience of the internet has become too passive, a very common experience is scrolling through lines, posts, pages of suggested content or letting one video play after the other, and everything is tailored/measured so that you scroll or watch more (and see more ads) being fed a constant stream of information typically with a very low signal to noise ratio. However, it is also nice sometimes to just relax and have an algorithm choose a next track because one has as much energy to spend in looking through stuff, and probably in music it works better than social media. I have not found something similar to that.
A side effect of ads (and something that ad blockers mask, giving websites a normal appearance) is that ad supported websites have the wrong incentive.
When you browse a website with no ads, you are the public. Content is provided for your use, and that's all.
When you visit an ad supported website, you are only the means to achieve an end, which is to have you in the site as much as possible, clicking on as much ads as possible. That usually had the effect of making the website content bloated.
Not all sites begin like that, but they all end like that. And ad blocking hides that ugly truth under a layer of normalcy.
I have a massive collection of Mp3s and wav files on my phone... Have cultivated it for decades now. I rarely stream music because of ads and bandwidth throttling that my mobile data provider implements.
About 2 weeks ago, I heard Black Player (App), which already works in a very unexpectedly and illogically difficult and frustrating manner, started injecting ads into my normal music library. I may just need to charge up my old iPod from now on, it doesn't ever need weekly software updates for some strange reason like everything else.
Yeah I do similar, I actually use musicolet to listen to my offline music library (https://krosbits.in/musicolet), an android app that is just offline, no ads, no network permission at all, nothing. It does the job very well and it does not mine any data or show any ads. I highly recommend to give it a try (I assume you use android?).
And to add, while it is free and I could have continued just fine not paying anything to use it, I have paid for the "pro features" that I did not even need (apart from chromecast which I do not use, the other pro features were mainly aesthetic) just to support the developer for providing such a great app that respects my privacy and does not bloat my phone. People think that somehow those who do not want to pay to youtube just want to get everything for free. I have no issue with paying for any service that adds value to my life and respects my privacy, but youtube/google is not just that, and the fact that I use youtube for free does not mean that I would use it the same way if I had to pay for it or had to watch ads all the time. And to be honest, the fact that the app did not require me to support it in order to not send me ads or whatever, made me more incentivised to actually support it, because the incentive to support comes exactly from the appreciation of the experience it provides.
Maybe this sounds like an ad for that app, and it actually is so. I think that such pieces of software that really respect the privacy and provide an alternative to shameless streaming services like the one discussed here are worth being advertised by their happy users.
A good way to think about the tracking urls attached to majority of websites these days, is as many different cameras tracking each person as it enters buildings and stores, using face-recognition.
Thus it stores all the places you have been and with ML and AI create some sort of personal file, with all kinds of attributes. (the more the better)
uBlock and others block these cameras from seeing your face.
To me your view is just common sense. I find it bizarre how some people seem to be treating ad-blockers like the equivalent of stealing in the comments.
It is YouTube's right to prevent me from using their site if I use an ad-blocker just as much as it is my right to stop using their service altogether if they prevent me from using it with an ad-blocker.
I totally agree, even if I hate it. There are a lot of internet users out there who have this expectation that they are owed a certain level of access for free to these services. Those expectations aren't unfounded: most content on the internet has been, more or less, free to access. It was a good time, but surely we all knew that it couldn't last forever?
The era of ultra monetization we're being ushered into is new and obviously its going to create some discomfort.
But that doesn't change the reality that these expectations are totally irrational and unreasonable. We can argue that the information should be free, that content should be accessible, that the sharing and proliferation of information without barriers of entry benefit all of us in the short and long term. But those esoteric philosophies can't win a debate against a corporations desire or fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit.
Money is tight for everyone across the board, borrowed or not (except maybe for apple). Why wouldn't they amputate the minority of users who are only costing Youtube money? I can't think of a good argument against it, other than "I hate it".
People are enraged by Netflix cracking down on account sharing, people were enraged by article paywalls, and people are and will be enraged by Youtube blocking ad blockers.
Unlike Netflix and article paywalls, Youtube has no real viable competitor. I get why the NYT allows me to bypass their paywall with a browser extension: if they truly make it impossible for me to bypass the article, I'll be able to find some other website that has reposted or reworded it. I get why Netflix allows me to bypass their account sharing: if they make it impossible for me to view the content without paying, I can just torrent it.
But Youtube is uniquely different. The product there is not just the body of content but their ecosystem which contains essentially every video on the internet and all the connective tissue to traverse billions of minutes of video. I use an adblocker on Youtube, but if they lock me out of that option, I'll still use YouTube, because where else would I go? No where.
Maybe I won't go to Youtube as often, but they'll have effectively converted me from being an extremely active viewer getting a free ride to an infrequent semi-active viewer that generates revenue.
That brings an interesting question: Would people start torrenting YouTube if it becomes inaccessible without a subscription? YouTube is exploding with high-quality long-form content, maybe pirates will consider those kind of videos worthwhile to torrent? Maybe the creators themselves will consider it worthwhile to host them with their own subscriptions?
YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay (And I am not talking about too broke to pay cases). Serving an infinite video catalog is very expensive in terms of all resources (And yes Netflix is not comparable, unlike YouTube, Netflix can highly leverage cache boxes at ISPs). Vimeo is one alternative for video hosting, and HN is surely not gonna like that model (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28547578).
So what is the alternative? (Peer to Peer for streaming doesn't seem a reasonable alternative at any scale, since most people own phones and then laptops, and much fewer desktops).
people are paying for the content with patreon, bypassing YouTube entirely. Why cant YouTube figure out how to get that money people are clearly willing to part with?
So? Patreon's taking a cut (but YouTube takes a bigger cut; a quick search indicates 30% vs 8%-12%). I'm fine with YouTube memberships in principle; if a creator that I support said "consider switching your support from Patreon to YouTube", I would. But there's no way I'm signing up for YouTube Premium.
The parent said youtube should be able to take money directly... and I pointed out they can. That's what's So. And I didn't say youtube premium, I said memberships. Tho if you have enough memberships premium makes more sense fiscally even tho it doesn't give the money to the creators as much.
People are also mad at that but sometimes less so. It seems those indirections launder the grumpy since there's not one focused place to complain. YouTube takes more because they're doing more work. It's funny cause no one seems to think YouTube deserves any munny for their technological marve of long tail content sometimes.
Isn't YouTube already doing that with channel memberships? I think people can also pay to comment on live streams or something.. They're definitely already letting you support creators directly, while taking their cut of course.
Yup. The livestream version is a "super chat" (or "super sticker" is an option), but even regular videos can turn on "super thanks" which let viewers donate and leave a comment. In any case, youtube takes 30%, so many streamers try to push to a third party option that takes a much lower fee. And the "and leave a comment" turns people off that option I'm sure, it'd be nice if they made it optional and just let you pseudo-anonymously support someone's video. Most people won't realize you can delete the comment right after making it and the channel still gets your money (not sure if the channel can still see the comment contents if any/account that did it). There's also "gifted memberships" which like memberships themselves is another feature lifted directly from Twitch. Given youtube's catch-up stance (Twitch also makes it difficult to use adblock) it's not hard to call them "failing" at monetizing; there are many interesting A/B experiments that could be done that they are not doing. (I think gifted memberships is no longer an A/B test feature but standard by now... so they do them sometimes, but not enough.) Part of it is also probably just Google culture; if something is "only" going to net them a few million in profit, it's not worth doing.
The amount of people paying with patreon is just so so tiny compared to people watching YouTube in any country or city that I am not even sure what your point is.
> Why cant YouTube figure out how to get that money people are clearly willing to part with?
What does this even mean? I hope you are not suggesting in good faith that YouTube should grab money from other companies somehow? Money that was given to that company by people with specific expectations in mind.
What exactly is YouTube failure here? The patreon citation is just so irrelevant because of scale. Taking all of Patreon revenue would not cover YouTube hosting costs.
People on HN love to talk about patreon as an alternative to youtube premium because it is an easy way out. But if it was representative of real world actions, Patreon would be processing a lot lot more money.
I have YT premium and it is easily the best money I spend most months. I'll just play devil's advocate. Maybe people are imagining a pay per view type of experience?
completely agree. ESPECIALLY if you have children. they can piggyback of your subscription and they wont get fed those horrendous adverts while they're searching for tutorial videos.
Its how the kids learn faster these days.. tutorial videos in small bites about specific subjects.
I don't like paying for premium, but at the same time I have been able to do things I never could have on my own, save tens of thousands of dollars in DIY projects, etc. My fear is they will raise the pricing and boil the frog.
Yep, of all my subscriptions, YTP will be the last to go. The experience truly is a premium one, only marred by the inability to disable YouTube shorts.
(I recently made near exactly the same comment in a recent, related story thread - but it's worth repeating).
Every time a news channel comes up in recommendations, click the three dots menu on it and choose "do not recommend videos from this channel" (or w/e).
After a short while of doing this the supply of news channels starts drying up, though the algo occasionally attempts to push increasingly unlikely ones on you; just continue mopping them up.
On Android, I disabled the YouTube app and use Firefox for YouTube, entirely because of the shorts. It lets you remove the shorts for 30 days in the browser. I did have to switch text messaging apps because the default option wouldn't work without YouTube enabled whenever someone sent a YouTube link.
It's indeed infuriating how these services try to cram TikTok style crap down our throats.
The stupid thing is: they try to get more popular than TikTok. How the hell do they expect to become popular with users that don't want this stuff? I'm not on TikTok, I hate YouTube shorts and Instagram reels. Just allow me to turn that shit off and I'll be a lot happier and use the service more because it's not pushing me away.
How do they think forcing it on unwilling users is in any way beneficial??
My biggest beef with Shorts is that it's the equivalent of having the shelves full of lollies and junk food if you're trying to be healthy; it's far better not to have any available if you want to stay lean.
I love long form YouTube videos as much as I loathe the short form, whose promotional algorithms are skewed towards content that's rubbish for the brain - and society.
Edit: On Samsung Internet, could browse to the mobile app and indeed hide the shorts for 30 days (little X in top right of Shorts content panel, not a setting). Furthermore, if I disable "open links in apps" under settings/useful features, I now get the YouTube icon to open the current video in the app - this lets me browse for videos without being bugged by Shorts, and I can then open in the app if I want some of its features such as play in background etc. Thanks again, great tip.
The one thing I don’t like is incognito mode in the YT app disables YT Premium.
From time to time I turn it in to look something up quick. Maybe a recipe or something. A topic I don’t want recommended to me constantly for the next few weeks.
But it also turns all ads back on. Instead you can watch it normally and remove it from your history, but I’m not sure that works.
Ok, work with me here… It’s incognito mode, the mode created such that it explicitly doesn’t carry over cookies from regular mode, or between sessions.
What exactly are folks expecting here? Google to break out of the explicitly requested sandbox?
Yes, they do. YouTube distributes your premium funds to creators by watch time. If they can’t associate your views with your subscription, they can’t compensate creators fairly.
Not to mention, it’s imminently not possible. Not without poking holes in what is and is not shared between regular and incognito mode (across 5+ browsers owned by different businesses, no less). And breaking this barrier would earn Google a ton of backlash, and rightfully so.
> across 5+ browsers owned by different businesses, no less
I don’t care about that. I agree this would be impossible in the browser.
I’m talking about the official app specifically, they should be able to do it there.
Premium funds is a good point I hadn’t thought of. I’d be fine if that didn’t happen while in incognito. Treat me like incognito mode for any other random user, just without ads.
I don’t run it all the time. And I wouldn’t if they did this. It’s extremely rare I want to do this.
But if I look up a recipe I’m likely to be bombarded with cooking channels. Home DIY fix? Similar. God forbid I look up a news video on a current event.
I dislike YouTube as much as the next person, but do you understand how unreasonable of an ask this is when you are explicitly going into incognito mode? I echo everyone else's sentiment here.
I don't know why everyone is fixated on the term incognito. I believe what GP wants (and me too) is to pause watching history or to at least exclude a viewing session from the recommendation algorithm.
The reason users such as yourself want this feature is because you don't have faith in the recommendation algorithm, right? If you watched a video and Google started pushing related videos that you don't want to constantly see, and you clicked on the "do not recommend this kind of video" option, and it actually worked, would you be satifised without this "exclude from recommendation algorithm" mode?
If yes, the better solution here would be to have a recommendation system that isn't garbage. I admit I kind of fancy this described mode, but the only reason is I don't currently trust Google to actually respect my expressed discontent. And if we don't trust Google to have a faithful recommendation system, why would we be willing to trust YouTube Premium?
+1 on this. YT premium is easily worth 4x its price, it's an amazing deal. It's the largest media catalog in the world, and unlimited ad-free access for $12 is a steal. There is no digital subscription that comes close in value.
Question, how do content creators get paid if the platform has no ads? I thought they get paid when I watch an ad, and even more if I engage with those ads? In fact, I maliciously (is this the right word) clicked on scam ads (youtube sends me lots of those).
And is it really worth 4x its price? I mean its just ads getting removed. I can tolerate ads easily.
I’m curious about the potential for adverse effects. Let’s say I pay YT $12/mo and Google keeps $3 for their costs. If I watch 1 video that month does that creator get $9? Does the creator get 5c per view from me regardless and some subscribers subsidize others?
I wish there was more transparency around what my money is actually buying.
Google shares a portion of their YT premium revenue with creators. In general a view from a YT premium user will earn a creator more money than a view from someone using YT for free and viewing ads.
(But any info I can find seems anecdotal, I don't think youtube publishes any numbers -- and earnings will depend on where in the world those viewers are, etc...)
They're paid with the subscription money based on how many members watch!
If you only watch a small number of videos or don't mind ads then it might not be worth 4x for you. However I personally find advertising deeply disturbing and am willing to do whatever it takes to be free of it.
I agree. I love YT Premium and I think it’s worth it for the amount I watch YT.
But almost everyone I ask thinks it’s a “scam”. The more technical the user, the more likely they are say something like “why should I have to pay when I have an add blocker”.
Like so many thing, there is almost a sense of entitlement to free content with clickable ads, which doesn’t bode well for the future.
The others either are willing to put up with the ads or think the price is much too high for the value of not seeing ads even if they watch tons of content.
I pay because I want to support the channels I watch and at this point the YT ads are just infuriating to me.
I also pay for YT Premium, but I have a gigantic complaint that it doesn't actually make YouTube completely ad-free. There are still the ads that the content produces insert themselves.
I'm not blaming the creators. I get it. They aren't making enough money from YouTube to avoid having to do their own promotions. But that means that YouTube is not giving me what I'm paying for. I'm paying for an ad-free experience and--because YouTube doesn't use my money to compensate creators well--I'm not getting and ad-free experience.
This could be fixed. Some creators have already split their sponsor blocks out into video chapters, making it very easy to skip. YouTube could mandate that content creators mark their sponsor pitches and both A) automatically skip it for paying users, and B) prevent skipping it for free users.
Yeah, YouTube premium is one of those rare subscriptions that as soon as it lapses I immediately resubscribe. The value for the money is just too good.
This is not comparable to Netflix et al. YouTube catalog is effectively infinite, and people watch all kinds of random content. Storing 10k movies and 20k TV episodes is a cakewalk compared to this.
There's undoubtably more data being served but I'd be very curious how the edge caching efficiencies differ given how many people watch the same things (recommended by the algorithm) and since YouTube's content is so much shorter on average that larger catalog is somewhat balanced by any given cache node being able to hold more videos.
The cache hit rate is actually pretty high. Also, google already has setups at pops for other reasons and can cache fill at lower qos for free much of the time.
> YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay
There's also a factor of quality and trust. I don't trust YouTube Premium enough to even try it. This is mostly colored by their constant, invasive disruption of my YouTube experience (particularly apparent on mobile) with YT Premium ads. Yes, I know it exist. No, I don't want it - the more you try to trick me into activating the trial, the less I want it.
> So what is the alternative? (Peer to Peer for streaming doesn't seem a reasonable alternative at any scale, since most people own phones and then laptops, and much fewer desktops).
Proper ad blocker on the desktop. yt-dlp for archiving/off-line playing. NewPipe or some other alternative YouTube players for mobile.
Yes, I know you meant a non-free-riding alternative, but hey - I have no problem paying for services, even for premium tiers when free tier is available. But I'm not getting bullied into subscribing.
I've been a subscriber ever since Google Play Music bundled it in, and it's fine. Sorry to hear you're getting bullied, but the paid experience really is rather nice.
> I have no problem paying for services, even for premium tiers when free tier is available.
> I don't trust YouTube Premium enough to even try it.
These two statements seem to be mutually incompatible unless you're trying to argue that a premium tier doesn't really exist unless you can write the terms of service and audit the company providing it. It's also somewhat hard to follow the logic here: if you don't trust YouTube, why are you watching them at all? It's not like Google tracks you less that way and if you're under the impression that your ad blocker is helping there you can certainly subscribe to Premium while leaving the same blocker enabled.
I don't make any excuses-- if the content is handed to me for free, I take it. They also hand me ads for free but I don't care for those, thanks.
It's really a strange concept that we're somehow cheating someone for not looking at an ad. And yet somehow it wouldn't be cheating if we poured over every ad but never bought anything in them.
But you are cheating someone. The creators of the videos you're watching don't get anything when you block the ads. That means you've cheated them of money, on top of cheating the company of money.
It's not handed to you for free, there's an implicit condition that you watch the content and the ads that are served with it. Too many people don't do that and that's why YouTube is now testing blocking ad-blockers. You reap what you sow.
>It's not handed to you for free, there's an implicit condition that you watch the content and the ads that are served with it.
No, there isn't. The web was designed from the beginning to allow the end user to have control over what content is and is not displayed. It isn't television, radio or magazines, the platform owner doesn't have complete control over the layout and display of the content they serve. There is no condition, implicit or otherwise, that the end user will pretend they're consuming an old media product just because web platforms can't move beyond old media models of revenue.
None of which require viewing, reading or listening to the ads, either. Ads have always been a gentleman's agreement.
>Too many people don't do that and that's why YouTube is now testing blocking ad-blockers. You reap what you sow.
No, Youtube is going to reap what it sowed, because no one is going to turn off their ad blockers. If their platform was worth paying for, everyone would have moved to the paid tier by now. Google bought a free video service and tried and failed to monetize it to the point of nearly ruining it for content creators with their puritanical rules, arbitrary demonitization, opaque to nonexistent support and restrictive algorithm, but no matter how much they squeeze the turnip, it won't bleed enough for them.
That's not our problem. We'll gladly support content creators directly through Patreon or other means, but Google can get fucked.
Which brings us right back to the article: don't be surprised when your ad-blocker stops working.
Serving high bitrate video is not cheap and YouTube is notoriously breaking even at best. Any alternative is going to be even less efficient and more expensive due to the lack of economies of scale that Google has. If that's what you want so long as it doesn't have Google's name in the corner, so be it, that's understandable.
>If their platform was worth paying for, everyone would have moved to the paid tier by now.
I disagree. I think people are inherently cheap and will exhaust other options of getting the same content for free first. We shall see I guess.
> don't be surprised when your ad-blocker stops working
Yes, it's an arms race, always has been. But it's more expensive for them to break the ad blockers than it will be for the ad blockers to inevitably update, so if it's a war of attrition, they will still inevitably lose.
The problem isn't that people aren't watching the ads, the problem is Google's business model doesn't work, not for Google, not for the consumer and certainly not for content creators, and the only solution they can come up with is trying to force people to watch ads - which never works.
>Any alternative is going to be even less efficient and more expensive due to the lack of economies of scale that Google has.
I mean, plenty of alternatives already exist, and content creators are starting to lead viewers to those alternatives, because of Youtube's arbitrary censorship and demonetization. Every social media platform hosts video now. There are decentralized platforms like Peertube. We're way past the point where "streaming video" is a hard problem that only Google-scale infrastructure can solve.
They're going to have to innovate or die like any other company, and disabuse themselves of the illusion that the web is a gravy train where the rules of supply and demand don't apply. This isn't innovation, this is desperation.
I don't know, but given the choice of watching slightly lower quality videos (which probably look the same on their phones anyway) and paying for a free service, most people will prefer lower quality videos.
If I were to allow all ads but make it a rule to never actually watch them or heaven forbid, buy anything in them, would that be ok? I'm sure it would be ok with the content provider, because then they get their money and that's all that counts.
If I can't watch it without ads, I simply won't watch it. And I certainly won't pay for it if it still includes ads.
the purpose of an advertisement is to give advertisement companies something to sell to product makers, and to give product makers something to have media companies put in front of viewers in exchange for money.
it's a whole economy unto itself. money changing hands, jobs, all of it. almost no one buys something because they saw an ad for it.
Your use of the service is governed by the terms[0], which say "You are not allowed to:... alter, modify or otherwise use any part of the Service or any Content...". Even if you've never signed up for a Google account, it's implicit that YouTube doesn't actually serve anything for free, every video view and page load is a transaction for "youtube serves me content and I pay for it by having screen real estate taken up by ads". They do not have to serve the content if they think you aren't upholding your end of the bargain, which is this ad blocker block.
I am sorry, but the internet right now is bloated with ads that slow down everything and create an absolute distraction when one tries to browse, I do not care if they have problem modifying the appearance and behaviour of a webpage that I have loaded on my browser, but this goes to anything in the internet basically. I am not gonna compromise myself before they all fix the internet of the mess they have created.
I pay for the content that I think it is worth supporting, and that's it. I do not think youtube is worth supporting, and if quite often the only reason I watch things there instead of somewhere else is due to laziness. Same for many creators I follow probably. If they set adblock restrictions I will just stop watching and that's it.
This is the same argument people make about piracy. About potential revenue. The fact of the matter is, if I couldn't watch the video without either watching ads or paying for premium, I wouldn't watch it at all. So, the creator gets no money either way. Same thing when I pirate software or a movie or a game. I wouldn't have paid for it anyway, so the amount of money the creator gets is the same, zero.
So don't watch it then. Serving video is not cheap and you're increasing costs for everyone else. I don't get to jump the fence at a music festival just because I wouldn't have gone if I had to pay.
Good news, they aren’t. Tons of content is on multiple services - if you really have a principled objection to Google, you should show that by supporting those services rather than boosting YouTube’s popularity.
"Tons of content on multiple services" =/= "Tons of alternative services"
There is only one viable alternative to Youtube that I'm aware of. I use it whenever I can, but that doesn't change the fact that Youtube holds a monopoly.
The videos are usually sponsored with the ads pushed by the streamer themselves. They’re getting paid just fine. YouTube freely steals my data so they’re doing just fine. I’m just being gaslit into thinking I’m a thief.
If you were actually worried about YouTube stealing your data, why do you keep giving it to them by using their service? Wouldn’t the smart move be to stop visiting?
It's a simple value estimate. Some things, at least in the moment, appear to be worth having some of your data stolen. Also there are measures that can be taken, such as using adblockers, that minimize the cost.
How is data being “stolen”? All of the data they collect is data which you are freely giving them by using their service, and ad blockers really don't prevent any of that: you're connecting to a Google server telling them where you live, what type of device you use, and what you're interested in. An ad blocker prevents you from seeing ads but it doesn't do anything to prevent resale of the data you volunteer.
You tell me, I was responding to your hypothetical question:
"If you were actually worried about YouTube stealing your data, why do you keep giving it to them by using their service?"
>An ad blocker prevents you from seeing ads but it doesn't do anything to prevent resale of the data you volunteer
True. That's why I still volunteer as little data as possible.
Anti-piracy folks love to use bullshit loaded terms (such as "piracy" itself) to justify some megacorporation taking over shit on my computer. Adblocking is now "cheating"?`
Speaking of loaded terms, what are they “taking over” by showing an ad along with the content? If you truly believed they posed the risk that incorrect terminology implies, why on earth would you continue using the site and giving them more opportunities to do so?
That's a lazy rationalization which doesn't even make sense — either way you're getting the exact same sandwich, it's just a question of whether you pay for it directly or by watching ads.
This also doesn't make any sense from the negative way you're describing it: you're eating at Cockroach Joe's every day so clearly you don't really believe the food is bad. If you're using YouTube now, any negative which you can possibly imagine is already happening: they're tracking what you watch and where you watch it from, they're telling advertisers what kind of devices you use as a proxy for your likely spending habits, etc. There's a 0% chance they do that less when it's their only option to make money to cover your usage costs!
> That's a lazy rationalization which doesn't even make sense — either way you're getting the exact same sandwich, it's just a question of whether you pay for it directly or by watching ads.
It's an imperfect analogy. But point remains. Some places can offer bad and good experiences side by side, and have a long reputation of shitting up a few good products over time.
> eating at Cockroach Joe's every day so clearly you don't really believe the food is bad.
No. I know some X is bad, and some Y is good. It doesn't mean I hate X, I hate X that such and such makes.
It's like that scene in Spaceballs. Don't order the menu special.
If you think it’s a bad experience, why do you keep going? The fact that you’re concerned about avoiding ads means you must find the content interesting and that means you should pay for what you use, either directly or indirectly.
Because it is designed for addiction? Is that up for debate? YouTube is top result because it is owned by Google. This is a standard business model.
People bet into slot machines. Put an entry fee into a room full of slot machines and see for yourself how many people come to play.
The only way for a casino to make sure people pay to play a slot machines is to keep a free entry option that is gets annoying quickly. It is creation of a problem to justify a paid solution. Ad blockers solve that problem for free and have to be blocked.
And people who are addicted to slot machines have their own favorite games that they play all day long. They might pay at a chance to play. Youtube doesn't actually want to have a competitor at the same time.
If you actually believe that you should be blocking YouTube, not just the ads. The excuses in this thread are like arguing that it’s okay to sneak into a casino’s free buffet because the gambling industry has plenty of money and is bad for people.
Problem is, if you want videos Youtube is most likely your only option. TikTok hosts only 5min snippets, it's better (or worse) at addiction explotation. Vimeo doesn't host videos you probably want. Nebula (and other subsrcibe services) are great but what if I want a conference talks?
To torture the analogy. This isn't sneaking in the free buffet. It's the option of only free buffet in casino offering stuff you aren't allergic to. But then forcing you to play some strip poker to get in. Sure you can pay to get in, but what guarantees I have they won't force gambling on paying customers or further deterioration of the free experience?
In other words, YouTube is giving you something you value but you don’t to follow the terms of the agreement. Just be honest and say that rather than trying to invent these weird narratives to try to make it sound more noble than freeloading.
"In other words" why not address their actual words? Youtube is giving us something we value, but that does not justify any given demand Youtube comes up with. There's nothing noble about blindly accepting the terms of a monopoly.
YouTube is not a monopoly and you can easily live a perfectly happy, normal life not using it if you hate ads that intensely or, since you clearly like it quite a bit and are not willing to consider alternatives, pay 1-2 coffees per month.
Since you took the liberty to replace slot machines with "casino's free buffet" - an especially disingenuous misrepresentation - I mean do you want to say that people go to casino for food, and when I specifically avoided using the word casino... Can I go ahead and say that you all are acting like addicts being called out? I mean, did I use say we should block YouTube?
Talk about the "lengths" people go to defend their addiction. This is my general impression of the lot here on HN. You guys are so deep into cult of bullshitting that normal argument feels like an attack and invites downvotes.
Many things can cause you to go to same place. Lack of meaningful choice, not being able to afford anything better, etc.
But YT premium on itself is bad value. I can replicate most of its value with... An ad blocker.
Why should I pay Google to solve problems it creates for me? That's just incentives them making more problems. Maybe they will add a solve a captcha every 5 min if not on Premium.
And lastly YT isn't above ruining it as well (see premium ads). History (see cable) teaches us, ads on premium is a matter of time.
YouTube Premium is my most loved subscription, for what it's worth. I don't even use the Music element, but if I did that would be another reason. While all other subscriptions I pause on and off waiting for content, YouTube has always had solid stuff -- from mindless good stuff, content reviews, learning household chores, to full-on lectures/talks from Universities/Conferences.
If you're getting served McDonalds at the world's largest buffet, it's because that is what you enjoy.
Where are you getting steak from? YouTube premium is the exact same content you like only paid for directly instead of by advertisers. You must already be watching stuff on YouTube and enjoying it because otherwise you wouldn’t care about whether it has ads.
> I'll eat at Cockroach Joe, but I won't pay. I also like to tell people I don't pay because it goes against my virtues. But I'll still go there to eat.
No, YTP money is paid to creators based on time YTP subscribers spend watching their content. So if you watch small channels that's who will benefit from your subscription.
The money mostly goes to large creators simply because those large creators have way more viewing hours.
The nice thing about YT Premium is that you have a single subscription to manage, and it then helps support a wide number of creators, even ones who you only see a single video of. It'll go to helping way more people in total than you would ever get around to signing up for individual Patreon subscriptions for.
The fact that we have to ask questions like this is indicative of google being a bad actor in this exchange. How much are they paying me for the data they steal?
They’re not stealing any data. You’re voluntarily giving it to them and if you don’t like the terms of the deal it’s trivially easy to stop by not going to YouTube.
Looking at your posts here, to me it seems like you are actively searching for reasons not to pay. Like you’re trying to justify some sort of cognitive dissonance you have on the matter.
Either pay up or admit (to yourself, us, whatever) that you’re not willing to pay for services you can get in an ad-supported format instead.
I only started getting a proper income recently. How exactly was I supposed to pay when my YT Premium used to be 5% of my income?
I already pay for Spotify and Amazon Prime. I literally don't have more disposable income. (Unless I throw in the emergency cash reserve or investments) I still have to pay for dental surgery and an optometrist.
What is it with people like you telling us to "admit" some deep seated desire? Is it so hard to not assume things about my life and create your own fantasy?
In terms of Google holding up their end of the bargain, the reason you shouldn't trust them is simple: it is the CEO and board's fiduciary duty to the shareholders to make the most of Google's immense market power. The legal requirements governing their behaviour are such that they have to ensure that of all the participants in a transaction, they win biggest and most often.
So you shouldn't pay at a grocery store also? At any other big company shop? Because as you said so eloquently:
"The reason you shouldn't trust them is simple: it is the CEO and board's fiduciary duty to the shareholders to make the most of any company's immense market power. The legal requirements governing their behaviour are such that they have to ensure that of all the participants in a transaction, they win biggest and most often."
Dunno about you but the (only) local grocery store in the small W.Australian town where I live is owned in majority by the local community who hold shares and see the books - the employees and store manager (all locals) get paid well and money is set aside for growth and infrastructure investment after which everything goes back to keeping prices low and supporting local farmers | business.
There's a lot of that here, it's a large state (3x size of Texas) with a low population (not much over 2 million) so a great deal of infrastructure is "socialised" from pooled money.
Grain pools for farmers, state electricity, education structured to reach all, etc.
It's a hybrid economy with elected representatives expected to represent those that elected them - and hasn't quite broken with scale yet.
We've also pooled a lot of the CDN mirrors that serve an isolated state with enough local oversight to be sure many internet services ride over any disconnects from cables being ripped up.
I'm in favour of locally robust networks - internet, food, reources, etc.
When Alphabet stops holding up their end of the bargain, I'll stop paying them money. A pretty standard business/customer relationship.
> The legal requirements governing their behaviour are such that they have to ensure that of all the participants in a transaction, they win biggest and most often.
This always makes me laugh. They may be the minority, but public companies like Costco and Target who prioritize employees and company longevity do exist.
>public companies like Costco and Target who prioritize employees and company longevity do exist.
I spent a few years working at Target and a few at a Walmart. I'd take the Walmart every day of the week, though of course some of this is the particular people in charge at the store level, etc. I found Target to treat its employees pretty terribly in comparison.
Respectfully, this anecdote does nothing to refute the point.
There are an uncountable number of variables which could have resulted in your experience that have nothing to do with Target's (or Walmart's) high level corporate strategies.
That said, I am sorry that it was your experience. Working for bad bosses sucks big time.
There’s also a bit of a big fish in a small pond that can happen - a normal target employee may very well be an absolutely top tier Walmart employee - and being too tier is always nice.
They don't have to short term maximize. They can totally decide that they want to maximize their position 100 years from now by making less money crowding out competitors and all shareholders can do is sell the stock.
Heck, just yesterday, the Delaware courts ruled that it was okay for Jack Dorsey to spend $306MM of shareholder money so he could drink with Jay-Z. (It was to buy Tidal, but Tidal was obviously a bad purchase).
This is a very naive take on that duty. Executives have enormous leeway in deciding what is best for their shareholders. The idea that they are bound to every lousy "makes a penny today damn the consequences" decision put in front of them is absurd.
Do business lie for money? Sure. But fiduciary duties don't compel that behavior.
It is a myth that fiduciary duty means maximising profit above all else. Let's see what that wiki page says:
> A fiduciary is someone who has undertaken to act for and on behalf of another in a particular matter in circumstances which give rise to a relationship of trust and confidence.
Under Delaware law, fiduciary duty splits into 3 parts: the duty of care, the duty of loyalty and the duty of good faith. Fiduciary duty to shareholders means being a faithful representative of their interests, not putting your own personal interests first, exercising care and good judgement. It absolutely does not mean maximising profits above ethics.
That’s a shame that they’re apparently a bit pushy (I have Premium so don’t see any of that), because it’s been 100% worth it in my experience. I feel I get more than enough value from YouTube Premium to have it for myself, whereas Netflix I would cancel if I didn’t share it with my parents and two siblings. If they crack down on password sharing, it will go and YT will stay…
Who said anything about "entitled"? Folks are ALL OVER this thread using emotionally-loaded language, because it's hard to argue for ads any other way.
The people who want the content most could pay the content creators. These creators would pay for video hosting in the same way they already pay for their hardware and software.
This way, you wouldn't have to pay (which is what the parent comment wants). But you would still have an incentive to pay, because if not enough people did, the content you liked might might not get made.
Youtube Premium is effectively a donation, frankly.
It's not in the legal sense, you do get a "product" for it. But it didn't take me long to realize that even paying for Youtube Premium, I was better off not logging into my account and just using NewPipe.
I really think the only reason to pay for Premium is if you want to donate money to Youtube.
I think what people want is for the old system to continue (similarly to the Netflix password sharing crackdown saga) - youtube pushes ads for people who don't adblock, some pay for premium, and the others are free from ads due to their exceptional skills of browser addon installation.
There are always people in the comments taking the side of the company with arguments like "they need to make money" - sure, i'm all for capitalism, free markets and profits, but I use my right to whine when a company changes the status quo for the worse (from my POV). Public outcry is a way to pressure them to either keep the current situation, or think of something else.
Indeed. The idealized market is supposed to be a feedback-based system. Publicly wining about what a company is doing is a form of consumer feedback just as much as "voting with your wallet" is, and arguably more effective.
For companies, it's Marketing 101 that if you can't or don't want to sell what people want, you can always brainwash or beat[0] people into "wanting" the thing you want to sell. But we do not have to take such treatment silently, or without a fight. By resisting, we raise the costs of anti-consumer moves ever so slightly. Maybe, sometimes, just enough to make the company - or the next one to follow - rethink if the change is really worth doing after all.
--
[0] - Metaphorically, of course. But when a company cancels the very product people like the most, in order to force them to use an inferior product, and knowing full well none of the competitors will come up with a replacement (because they're all in lock step, what isn't profitable for one won't be for another, etc.) - being on a receiving end of that does feel like being beaten into submission.
I share the sentiments — I happily pay for all kinds of digital subs, but YouTube really rubs me the wrong way. Yes, it feels like they’re trying to trick me into a sub, and yes I realize if I do it, the tricks will go away. I just don’t feel good about giving money to a company like this.
It’s the same reason I eventually got rid of my Pixel — it felt like a box just for Google to push ads at me, even though it was a premium product at a premium price.
I actually was a Play Music subscriber before it got rolled into YouTube premium (rip). So I never saw the popups except (ironically?) on my @google.com work account.
I watch so much YouTube on my TV that Premium just makes sense. I can't block ads on my TV. It's really worth it in that case. The experience of watching brain rotting ads is such an undesirable prospect I will gladly pay them to avoid it.
I think it's more nuanced than that. Personally I love/hate YouTube:
Love:
* Most of my favorite creators are there
* Ahh, that's it.
Hate:
* Seems to have no actual humans working there, or no way to reach them in the event of disputes. If someone posting to HN about their business locked out of their account is the best way to get support, there's a problem.
* Keeps getting better and better at..... pushing extremist content and crypto scams.
* Removes tools (like dislike counts) that helped users spot bad content.
* Charges $23/mo for premium which bundles a bunch of stuff I don't give a rat's ass about (youtube music? no thank you!), in addition to just removing ads. (That's only $2 less than I pay for my cable modem, like, seriously ridiculous territory.)
* Doesn't disclose how much of that subscription actually ends up in creators' pockets.
If they solved those last two issues, would I sign up? Ahh, no. They're still a net negative.
I'd much rather try to drag my favorite creators into posting elsewhere. I've signed up for Nebula and I support roughly two dozen creators on Patreon and similar tipjar/support systems. I'm trying to put my money where my mouth is, because IMO YouTube is circling the drain and getting desperate, and the sooner we develop viable alternatives, the better.
So, no, there's nothing YouTube (and their parent corporation DoubleClick wearing a Google mask) can do at this point would make me cut them a check. I'm working as hard as I reasonably can to make them obsolete.
YouTube premium was probably the best decision I did. Amount of time saved on ads alone makes it worth it. Other bonus feature - downloading videos. If you make enough money it is a no brainer together with things like extra cloud storage from google, Apple and now ChatGPT
These days, I'll happily not use a service/ product/ whatever if I have to pay for it.
But YouTube Premium, ad free, is wonderful. I bought it for my parents because they watch a lot of niche stuff. But now that I have it, it's worth even the crazy price increase (to like, $22/mo or something).
I like it better than Netflix/ Disney+/ HBO Max, as it's half entertainment, half educational (whereas the other streaming services are more entertainment and often doesn't keep me interested in spite of their catalogues).
You can save even more time by using SponsorBlock. I believe premium only gives you fake downloading -- you can't take it out of their app (correct me if I'm wrong). In contrast yt-dlp gives you direct access to the files.
YouTube premium downloading does store the video in the browser data store I think, yes.
I use yt-dlp for videos I want to keep a copy of, which are few and far between, and I use YT premium's download feature to queue up stuff I want to watch on my phone later when I know I'm going to a poor coverage area.
True - With RIAA and such making YT implement something that looks like DRM just to say they have DRM on songs, I don't think YT is ready to actually offer downloading other peoples' videos from their official UI. For those that don't want to mess with yt-dlp, it's easy enough to search "youtube downloader" on Google.
I'm a heavy YouTube user (by my own standards... 2-3 hours a day) and a happy premium subscriber, and I totally agree that sponsorblock is a must-have.
I think that's biggest issue in this thread.
People locked down into their devices not even realizing there's relatively free-er world outside their locked-device bubble.
I barely visit sites with ads. And on my phone I have 1Blocker that blocks all the sites.
I used to be very tech savvy and solved a lot of problems with coding/software etc, no I grew up and switched to Mac and iPhone and if there is a problem (aka YouTube ads) that can be solved with money then I buy it. I used to torrent movies but now I value my time more than money and happily pay or overpay to save any time that is wasted.
I've lived my whole life, just about, with an ad blocker in my browser, and I have yet to see the prophesised arms race. Maybe a dozen sites have refused to load the actual content, and of those only a couple asked me to subscribe (pay) for an ad-free experience (they were newspapers IIRC).
Not sure what you don’t trust about it. I love Premium. I’ve had it for years, and YouTube is the best streaming platform there is in my book. It honestly just seems like something you are being stubborn over for no good reason. Stop hitting yourself sort of thing. No one is bullying you. Oh, they are advertising a service in their app that dramatically improves the experience and supports the channels you watch. But no, they are bullying you. Please.
You're not missing anything. The really weird thing about Youtube Premium is that even if you do pay for it, you're better off not signing into your account and still using uBlock Origin and NewPipe.
I paid for Youtube Premium for a pretty long while, and the only reason to pay for it is because you want to support Youtube. The official app for Android was awful the last time I used it, I've never been tempted to go back to it from NewPipe. You'd download videos and sometimes Youtube would just decide, "no, that's not downloaded anymore." It was way more battery hungry than NewPipe. I had less control over mobile data. It was glitchier and I couldn't turn off distracting features like comments or recommendations.
There was also this weird problem where signing in on both desktop and mobile would occasionally mess with playback and Google would tell me that I needed to only have a video on one device at a time. NewPipe doesn't have that problem.
And there's the privacy angle: Youtube Premium necessarily requires you to be logged in and to have your videos tracked, that's part of how the funds get distributed to creators.
---
So for a while I just gave Youtube money and literally didn't use the service at all, because adblocking was better in every way. But I gave them money because I wanted to pay for the service. And eventually I realized I couldn't figure out what I was paying for. I wasn't paying for content, because I wasn't logged in, so the people I was watching weren't getting subscription revenue from me. I was giving Google money, but it wasn't clear to me that giving them money was proving anything or making Youtube better or encouraging them to do anything -- whenever I looked at Youtube Premium it seemed like the service was actively getting worse and that a lot of the annoyances I was supposedly paying to avoid were creeping back into the service.
And I eventually realized that Youtube does provide Google value even if I'm not paying for it. It allows them to effectively hold a near-monopoly on independent video hosting online. And so I stopped paying for it because the only reason to pay for it was for an idealistic reason, and I realized that I'm actually be fine with Youtube failing and more independent sites popping up, and I don't actually want to encourage Youtube and if anything I'm happy for it to be a loss-leader for Google. For the creators themselves, direct donations turn out to be a lot more valuable, and I try to do that now when I can.
But every once and a while it comes up as an example of "people won't pay for anything" and like... I just don't think that's true. The reality is you are paying for less than nothing when you use Youtube Premium. You are paying for a worse experience than you would get from an adblocker, and in some cases you're paying for even more annoyance when Google starts getting snippy about how you use your accounts between computers. Idealism is one thing, but is it actually surprising to anyone that people don't feel motivated to donate money to Google?
Because that's what Youtube Premium is. There is no reason to use it unless you want to donate money to Google. The price isn't even the main issue -- even if Youtube Premium was free, I wouldn't use it. It's a worse experience than 3rd-party clients and adblockers. It exists so that Google can try to tie it into existing services or make a case to the public that they need ads, but this is not a serious effort by a company that actually wants to offer a real service for money.
> Or, and stick with me here, you want to support the creators. Because the creators get most of the money from premium subscriptions.
I already brought this up above. The creators won't get money unless you sign into Youtube Premium and watch videos using that account, and that is a straightforwardly, almost universally worse experience than just using NewPipe and uBlock Origin anonymously.
Youtube Premium is more valuable to creators than ads, but part of the reason for that is because ads pay basically nothing to creators. The payout structure for Youtube Premium is weird and not really healthy for an ecosystem (since it works off of view percentages which discourages more professional projects in favor of spam). It's still not a lot of money, and it's ultimately a kind of bad system for funding creators. If you do want to support creators (and you should), donate to them directly when possible.
It doesn't make sense to purposefully make your viewing experience worse so that creators can get a fraction of that subscription revenue. You're supporting Youtube with Premium; but you'll help actual creators much more by using Patreon, Twitch subscriptions/donations, buying merchandise, or just donating directly if they support it.
Even if Youtube Premium was giving a comparable payout to direct support (which it's not), most creators on Youtube don't want to be reliant on Youtube for their revenue. Direct donations allow them to have more agency over the stuff they make, and subscriptions/purchases outside of Youtube allow them to stress out less about the fact that Google controls their entire livelihood.
So, since you want to watch with an account incompatible setup, premium is incapable of compensating creators. Ok. I get that.
I still disagree with your conclusion, since it’s a self imposed restriction that results in creators not being compensated. That’s on you, not YouTube.
I make a point to donate to creators I watch. I'm not compensating Youtube (although I did pay for Premium for quite a while), but I am compensating creators.
And yeah, that's easy for me rationalize, because I'm honestly not particularly happy with Youtube as it exists today, I think it has close to a monopoly on indie video online, and I think it would be good for other services to pop up around it. If it was possible for me to avoid Youtube entirely, I would, but... see the monopoly bit again. I don't think anyone saying "just walk away from Youtube" is making a serious suggestion.
But even given the above situation, if I thought paying for Youtube Premium would encourage Google in a positive direction, I would do it. I did do it. I just don't believe it will anymore. My experience with Youtube Premium was that it got weirder and weirder the longer I used it, and I didn't see any evidence it was helping Youtube as a platform.
If I can get out of that relationship while still supporting creators, I'm happy to do so.
Same here but I skipped the Premium step. I pay creators directly, through Patreon and similar.
When the "how to replace the thermal cutout in a Kenmore dryer" video helped me (and did so with a minimum of fluff), I bought the parts from the company that posted the video. (A whole set of spares, because why not? Pay shipping once, put 'em on the shelf, and have a zero-minute response time next time something fails.)
When I realize I'm 3 videos deep into someone's channel and I'm wishing the clock wasn't staring at me so judgmentally, I head for their Patreon straight away. Or their merch store. Or whatever lets me tuck some money directly from my pocket into theirs.
The next step is to find hosting elsewhere. I should make another attempt with PeerTube or something, or see if someone's building a video frontend for IPFS or whatever. And then start pestering my favorite creators into double-posting their content. Yes it's more work, and they won't do it unless there's a base of users who likewise feel good about paying creators. But I can be the start of that.
I tried to self-host Peertube at least for my own content but it was too much work to keep up to date for me and I eventually ended up letting my private instance die.
I haven't looked around recently to see if there's managed hosting somewhere that I can link to my own domain, but I'd be very tempted to sign up for a service like that. I like the idea of Peertube quite a bit, particularly around how it manages bandwidth -- I think that's very clever. I just realized that I don't take an active enough IT role in my infrastructure to handle setting it up myself and to trust myself to keep it patched and secure.
----
But yeah, aside from hosting direct donations/purchases are the way to go. Sometimes that can be very difficult to do. Patreon has a lot of problems but has honestly been huge for enabling easier payments. We're in desperate need of better private micropayment systems for the web. Cryptocurrency was a disaster, and not everyone is always on sites like Patreon, which I get because it's work to maintain a presence on those sites.
YouTube Premium means you are paying YouTube for content made by someone else than YouTube, while YouTube generates lots of ad revenue from non-Premium users. Makes me feel I’m compensating the wrong person. I wish a higher percentage of my fees go directly to video makers and that they indicate clearly how much I gave each creator.
Youtube is my living, Premium pays out a LOT more than ads do per view. It might be nearly 3X for me. So a Premium subscription definitely helps out the creators, a lot more than even watching ads.
Going from 1-10 cents per view to 3-30 cents per view (and this is generous, some estimates put the low end at 2/10 cents per view) doesn't seem that big of a deal. Encourage your subscribers to buy a single $5 superchat/superthanks/1 month membership instead (of which you get $3.50) every so often instead and continue to enjoy a life of improved sanity from no ads via adblock without paying an egregiously large monthly fee for Premium.
But viewers don't want to have to be constantly bombarded with "encouragement" for superchats. It's a bad experience no different than an in-video sponsored read, or any other YouTube ad.
I don't disagree, and I wouldn't suggest a creator constantly bombard it. (However, that might be most effective, as constantly bombarding with "like and subscribe" seems to be, though personally for me I don't tend to watch channels that do that and for the random videos I do see where they do, it's often skipped by sponsorblock.) However I think if a creator wants to be honest with their viewers that they will stop creating unless they can receive $X across ads/premium/superchats/patreon/as many options as they can, rather than trying to bully them into thinking the only choices of support are an absurd premium fee to the platform or psychological self-harm by enabling ads, that is a good thing. As would be their decision to actually stop spending their time doing something that isn't worthwhile to them if they can't make it. Meanwhile other creators will happily go on creating high quality stuff for free because they don't care about making money that way, and youtube itself will be fine as even adblocking users, who also never directly monetize another way, contribute enough indirect revenue (user profiling, algorithm shaping, user growth, recommending...) to the rest of google's empire that it doesn't matter. (And if they do monetize ever with e.g. a single $5 superchat once in a blue moon, google's $1.50 cut of that, even after their expenses of payment processing, can make up for quite a lot of missed ad impressions.)
Premium views pay out a lot more according to LinusTechTips [0,1], and early on it was paying out based on watch time, so hugely disproportionate payouts happened[2].
YouTube Premium is my #1 favorite subscription. YouTube is unusable without it. I also get immense value from YouTube. It's really a win-win in my book.
What I don't understand (speaking of Vimeo) is why doesn't YouTube offer a plan where individual content creators can choose to pay a monthly fee to keep ads off of their own videos for all viewers. Speaking for myself I would happily pay for that.
You can read the Vimeo thread for why it can not work. If people pay a monthly fee, and their views skyrocket, you either have to force them to pay much more, or to restrict their views somehow, both of which are just so so bad compared to the current scenario (this is exactly what Vimeo did).
Surely there must be limits, though. I have recently witnessed a couple of 1 hour+ long “adverts”. I can bear adverts when watching youtube videos. But not 1h+ long…
Isn't it Youtube's problem to make their business profitable? It's not a binary - they could offer a different deal with Premium, market it differently. Customers aren't rational - just like humans. They are a massive multinational - if anyone can figure it out, it's them.
Maybe the ad model doesn't work, and people are not clear on what they are actually paying for, since it's effortless to get the same service for free.
Edit: And I'm suprised few people are mentionning how much information youtube gets about you from using the site, and using youtube premium makes being anonymous impossible. Having a way to remaing somewhat anonymous would make me consider premium, but it's a not go for me at this time
It is YouTube's problem to make their business profitable. And hence they will make efforts like what the article says. If things don't work they might require login and enforce ads somehow (YouTube will survive that I think, even if there is some viewership drop). There is no magic wand here that they can figure out (look at competing video services like Vimeo for an example). In the long run in 20 years if YouTube is deemed unprofitable as a whole for the company, it might even be shut down, and nobody might be willing to host another YouTube like service as is without significant changes to monetisation.
I guess I'm fine with that! Or maybe some billionaire will make it it's gift to humanity. Crazy that we have public libraries but no public youtube/wiki government supported
YouTube costs a lot, and even that because it can rely on Google's amazing infrastructure which is optimised to the core. There is no billionaire who can even cover 10 years of YouTube costs.
I'm sorry, in two years they upped their revenue by over 10b - from 19 to 28b - I'm fairly certain they are having record profits. (Google doesn't release numbers for youtube's revenue, so that's the best number you're getting)
You don't spend the kind of money staffing a product like YouTube unless there are lots of profits too.
Everyone seems to have read an article from 10+ years ago and haven't updated their opinion since. The internet is wildly different now. Tech makes huge profits.
>Edit: And I'm suprised few people are mentionning how much information youtube gets about you from using the site, and using youtube premium makes being anonymous impossible.
This is an important point. How much money is Google making by being able to track and spy on YouTube viewers?
YouTube’s unit economics are fairly unique in that monetisation rates put a ceiling on video quality.
Even with the best networks and infrastructure in the world, they would struggle to break even on 4K video with say $2 CPM. Obviously they exceed that threshold at the moment for 4K, but maybe not for 8K or 16k.
If I didn't have to tie my identity to my browsing/watching history (through credit card) then I would pay... but I guess that would imply them supporting alternative payment methods and also them not being able to sell this data (i.e. the subscription would be more expensive).
Unlikely to happen, so I will keep ad-blocking or eventually stop watching if they make ad-blocking too difficult (happened with Twitch for me)
I feel the same way. It's not just about the privacy aspects, too. It's also about the convenience. I don't want to have to create and use an account just to pay for video content. I want something more along the lines of dropping coins/bills into the instrument case of a street musician.
I'd be ok woth paying for their service, as we use youtube a lot. But youtube forces you to create a google account and stay logged in. This way they can easily track almost everything you do on the web, and I'm definitely not ok with paying for being tracked.
If this was a youtube-only account (as it was in the past) then I'll immediately start paying for their service.
For Chrome you can setup up different profiles. It's not as nice as containers since separate profiles force you to have different Chrome windows, but it gets the job done.
I have a Facebook-only Chrome profile that keeps Facebook from tracking me all over the web.
That's my beef too. I already pay for twitch turbo which I find to be less valuable, so it's not the cost. I just don't want to be logged into youtube all the time. And I'll never log into my google account from a work computer.
Peer to peer and microtransactions might work. So some people with computers can keep one tab open and earn some crypto cents.
I'm not sure if it's possible to build P2P network with zero trust that could work like that.
One issue could be that participating person might technically be involved with distribution of forbidden content like child porn or disney cartoon. So even if they didn't know that and everything was encrypted, they might still be accountable for it, especially because they made money doing it.
People don't like micro transactions. Please try to think of one micro transaction product that ever got any traction.
The number of desktops is tiny compared to phone and laptop users, so I don't see how this can be scaled. (And it's not even clear the cents people would earn would even cover their electricity/data costs)
What many people specifically don’t like about subscriptions are the transactions, IMO. Transaction costs aren’t zero, and microtransactions just introduce more of them.
It's not that I wouldn't want to pay. I can just (so far) watch the stuff with an adblocker and have effectively no additional value by giving YouTube money for premium.
Youtube has ~500 hours of video uploaded every minute. Netflix only has content from the past few months/years, and probably only a few thousand hours _total_.
I guess the reasoning is that Youtube has a way larger catalog while Netflix's catalog is comparatively small. I don't really think this really a legitimate reason though, given that most social media has huge power laws, that is it's likely that 99% of each day's views are for a very tiny number of videos comparable to the size of Netflix's catalog.
Yes, for the remaining 1% youtube has to provide some central service, but that's just a small fraction of their traffic, and if they run into cost problems there they just increase the size of the caches at the ISPs, or introduce layered caching (one for each continent, then one for each ISP, etc). They probably do all of that already.
Storing those huge amount of videos that get maybe 1 view per decade each, that's a different challenge, but I wouldn't say the traffic is. But I don't know youtube's data maybe there is no power law in effect for them, idk.
I think you make a good point but I think part of the problem is that it is difficult to get people to pay for something that they have gotten used to getting for free.
One thing I haven't seen discussed here is: how exactly are they going to remove that option? Are they going to embed the ads into the video stream on-the-fly somehow?
One way would be to require logins and then timeout accounts that behave abnormally wrt ads. Given that WASM will be mainstream soon, it will be hard to monkey patch the code to prevent all this.
Youtube can tell if an ad is blocked. They can then refuse to serve the video. Instead replacing it with an image that says "please turn off your adblocker" or the like.
Some site off X free articles per month. Can't YT do the same? Along the same lines, if there are heavy TY users, can't they be ad'ed more than average?
The point being, it's hard to want to pay for the no-ads experience when you rarely if ever get to experience it and/or your YT usage is not that often.
I would pay, but I refuse to pay for YouTube music. I used the much superior Google Play Music until they killed it, and I refused to eat the new dogfood.
People don't want to pay for subscriptions because everything has become a bait and switch with infinite tiers!
Whether it's the local newspaper, or a mega-tech company's corporate offerings.
I tried subscribing (online) to my hometown newspaper within the last year. And a major national news publication.
You know how people say (or used to) that the garbage on the internet is the fault of the public for not being willing to pay for good journalism.
Well, guess what? You pay, you're just a sucker, probably senile and out of touch, so every third thing you click on is still behind a pay wall in the hopes you'll upgrade.
And, you know, it's being done to big dumb corporations with all the software-as-a-service offerings, and they're sucking up your tax dollars from government the same way. I don't want to name names, but the entire game seems to be slicing up features randomly and making up excuses to charge more for almost every one.
And before you raise the hypothetical question of additional tiers in future, by that kind of logic people shouldn't make any recurring purchase of anything since in future terms might change.
If there's just one tier, but it doesn't include what I'd expect, then I'd be even less happy than if there are more tiers - but they probably will get around to adding them.
What you are describing is just wishful thinking. There is no business model which has just one tier with the perfect specs and the perfect price for millions of people, let alone hundreds of millions.
It's just like cable TV. They promised that a subscription to cable TV would mean no ads. They lied, and went back on their promise within a very short time.
But if you apply this line of reasoning, you will never make a single recurring purchase. Sure, if they introduce ads to premium I will be the among the first to cancel.
I would be happy to never make another recurring purchase ever again. Bill me for actual usage, like a utility, but subscriptions for everything sucks.
> by that kind of logic people shouldn't make any recurring purchase of anything since in future terms might change.
20 years ago, you'd be right. This argument would be paranoid nonsense. But that's not the world we live in.
We live in a world where your car manufacturer wants you to pay monthly for heated seats. Today it's normal for hardware you bought outright only works if you pay rent to someone else, and services like Netflix reduce features and increase the price. Amazon can, at any moment, delete books from your kindle that you already paid for. Digital rent extraction is a huge part of how the tech industry operates today.
Yes, you should avoid subscriptions where you can, because there is a real risk that they'll change the rules to take away what you paid for down the line.
And especially don't trust the advertising company to not put ads in their paid tiers down the line.
Paying to skip ads just raises the value of your attention even further because now they know you've got enough disposable income to pay for such frivolous things. The truth is that not advertising to everyone at all times is leaving money on the table and it's only a matter of time before some bonus-seeking executive turns that into his payday opportunity. Besides, even if you pay for premium you'll still get ads hardcoded into videos as sponsored segments and you'll still be tracked and profiled by Google.
Ads are immoral and should not be a valid business model to begin with. What YouTube is doing is exactly what should be done: pay us, or we won't actually send you the video. The network is the boundary: I'm not gonna try to hack into their servers to get a video they don't want to send me. If they send me the video for free though, that's their decision. They can send me ads too hoping I'll look at then but I make no such promise. They don't get to complain at all if I block them just like magazines don't get to complain if I rip out the ad pages and throw them in the trash.
Many channels are successfully backed by patrons via patreon. That seems to be the most ethical way in my understanding.
I'll argue the case here though I go back and forth how strongly I hold this view.
Ads are immoral because modern advertising is carefully engineered brainwashing, often filled with factually incorrect claims (which are legally permitted as "hyperbole"). Beyond creating demand for products that the viewer would be better off without the brainwashing component in many often damages the viewers level of personal satisfaction or feelings of self worth by playing to their insecurities or creating unrealistic comparisons (which by implication or claim the purchase will cure). Because of this advertising can be negative sum -- anytime the benefit of introducing someone to the product is outweighed by the harm created by the effort to convince the user they need it. For example, ads for things you can't afford can create longing that can't be answered, yet don't provide you the benefit of the good (or the seller the benefit of the sale!).
One can construct advertising which is harder to fault morally, but because its less effective its generally outbid by things further over on the brainwashing spectrum.
Even where the ad can't be describe as brainwashing unless its in a catalogue of goods or similar, the user wasn't looking for it right now and so by forcing them to watch it you're taking their time. Because copyright creates a monopoly for goods, the user often doesn't have the opportunity to choose instead "similar to X but with less time wasting ads". Since the user is denied a practical alternative (other than a costly 'go without entirely') you cannot say that their consent to view the advertisement was freely given -- and consent not freely given isn't valid. As such, even a brainwashing free advertisement is ethically dubious because its stealing the user's time.
> One can construct advertising which is harder to fault morally, but because its less effective its generally outbid by things further over on the brainwashing spectrum.
I think there exists a solution, but it is a hard sell.
Ads by themselves are not inherently immoral. On the contrary, paid promotions performed by the person who is doing the show are part of the show, and, if done in good faith by a well-known and trusted person, can be considered a credible endorsement of the products being promoted. A relevant and creative promotion will not be skipped over even when there is such choice.
There are people who make mediocre/misleading/fraudulent/infected/immoral ads - this is one root of the evil, and the second root lies in creators willingly giving up part of the screen time to the content that they have no control over and that, realistically, no human other than the potentially-malicious advertisement author has approved for airing.
You are right that good ads are generally outbid by things further over on the brainwashing spectrum. So, it's bidding on ads that were not reviewed by relevant humans that's the problem.
Idea of a solution: make creators that want to profit from ads watch these ads and approve the best ones for their audience. Don't run unapproved ads no matter how high they bid.
The place where this fails is the extra amount of work shifted onto creators: it's too much work to watch let's say 50 ads that the algorithm thinks are relevant, in order to select the best 5, so that only they are rotated.
There's also the issue of the ad using a different language to the one that the creator knows about or an ad talking about a product they're not familiar with.
I guess they could just not approve of any of those ads but if their income plummets they might be tempted to start approving them
I justify it by stating that my attention belongs to me. No one is entitled to it. My attention is not a currency that can be used to pay for products. It doesn't belong to the corporation and it absolutely isn't something they can sell off to the highest bidder.
I choose what to pay attention to. Anyone and anything that grabs my attention without my consent is violating my boundaries. Advertising's entire business model consists of mind raping people for profit. Forcibly injecting their little brands, slogans, ideas into people's minds whether they want it or not. It increases revenue so everyone is heavily incentivized to consider it legitimate. Well I don't consider that activity to be legitimate at all.
Ad blocker? It's just self defense. I don't lose any sleep over it and neither should anyone else.
If someone taps you on the shoulder, they are performing an immoral action by grabbing your attention?
I think you have an irrationally radical take on this. I can understand disdain for targeted or excessive and intrusive ads -- I use an ad blocker too. But to say that advertising as a whole is immoral seems overblown.
What constitutes an ad? Can I put a yellow label on my can of beans I sell, or is that too vibrant and might catch your eye in the supermarket? Should all products and signage be black/white to protect your delicate attention span?
> If someone taps you on the shoulder, they are performing an immoral action by grabbing your attention?
My boundaries aren't so strict when it comes to my personal space. People usually have good reasons to call my attention when they tap my shoulders. I just don't get advertised to when I turn around to greet them. Usually they want to ask me a question or simply socialize.
People don't like to be rude. They don't like to bother others without good reason. They want the social activity to be a positive experience so that they will be accepted by others. That's the social norm and it protects me from abuses such as random people tapping me on the shoulder for idiotic reasons such as advertising. You'd have to be some kind of sociopath to think it's okay to tap someone on the shoulders and start pushing products at them the second they turn around. Mercifully, people that bold just don't seem to exist in my social circles.
> you have an irrationally radical take on this
Radical? OK. Nothing wrong with being radical. Compromise is the root of all evil.
Irrational? No. I spent a lot of time thinking about this. If you want to claim I'm irrational, you need to refute everything I've said to the point it looks like I'm babbling incoherently.
> But to say that advertising as a whole is immoral seems overblown.
Not at all. Advertising is by definition information people didn't ask for. It's noise, to be filtered. It's audiovisual pollution.
> What constitutes an ad?
Information I did not seek out. For example, when I open this web site, it's because I want to read and post comments. I don't come here to look at products. If HN starts sending me ads for products I'll block them.
> Can I put a yellow label on my can of beans I sell, or is that too vibrant and might catch your eye in the supermarket?
If I go to the supermarket, it's because I want to buy products. If I open an app store, it's because I want to see apps. It's okay to show me the stuff.
The key point here is I asked for it. I don't even consider it advertising in that case. It's just the information I wanted.
> Show Should all products and signage be black/white to protect your delicate attention span?
In my country there's laws in certain cities to that effect. I think it's pretty great.
>If you want to claim I'm irrational, you need to refute everything I've said to the point it looks like I'm babbling incoherently.
Your claim that advertising is immoral is what I see as irrational. Not that you hate ads. You've provided no grounds for why its actually inherently wrong to advertise. If anything, you've contradicted yourself. There are times where you think it is okay for something to grab your attention, like when you go to the supermarket.
Perhaps we are disagreeing on what an ad is. "Information I did not seek out" is not a good definition of an advertisement. Just because you are looking for it, doesn't mean it isn't an ad. I'd claim an ad is anything that promotes a product, service, or event. Given that definition, would you still consider all advertising immoral?
I don't like that paid subscription services usually changes to be worse the day they get high enough market share. And content providers are severely fragmented that it become expensive to enjoy them all. Sure we can switch subscriptions for some months to enjoy different content provider for same expense, but it's such a hassle to do it imo.
I want a paid for video streaming service with the following:
* No attachment to Google
* Enough network effect / traction to be interesting
* No predatory data collection and recommendation algorithms
YouTube premium isn't that. So for now I use Newpipe and ad blockers. If they lock it down, hopefully there will be enough traction somewhere else to pick up where they left off.
What you want kinda exists in other hosting providers like Vimeo, but the economics is not pretty and most people don't want such a service (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28547578). What you missed in your requirement list is how much will you be willing to pay for the service you desire.
The issue with YouTube is that it’s not a cheaper alternative. I think a lot of people are like me and find it mostly of little value which is why they don’t pay and will probably just stop using it if they have to go through a ton of ads.
I used to have Youtube Red or whatever it was, along with Google Music. Then they got rid of Google Music, replacing it with Youtube Music that I didn't want. And then they ruined Youtube by intentionally nerfing it on Firefox, ruining my subscription feed, changing the algorithm to reinforce short form clickbait, and adding things like Shorts and autoplay that, no matter how many times I turn them off, they always come back.
So I switched to Floatplane (3 subscriptions) and Spotify. I have no problem paying for content. I have a HUGE problem paying Google.
Probably the alternative is to simply not watch any video on YouTube at all. I'd love YouTube to do that for me because that's probably going to beneficial to me in general. I wish I could do that by myself.
Google does cache YouTube content in ISP data centers using GGC (Google Global Cache) servers. Their docs says the majority of GGC traffic is cacheable YouTube content.
It’s a recurring pattern on the Internet: people unashamedly claiming they’re getting X for free, and will gladly pay if Y condition is met. Then Y condition is met, and people (possibly the same, possibly different) unashamedly come up with new excuses of why they’re still getting it for free and won’t pay.
Never believe “I’ll pay if …” if you’re running a business.
Or this could be evidence that YouTube is coming up with new ways to be bad faster than they're fixing their problems. Shorts, removal of the Dislike button, repeatedly and retroactively changing the rules on 'advertiser friendliness' without warning, degrading their own search feature in favour of algorithmic content, spurious bans, a guilty-until-proven-innocent copyright strike system that's easily and openly exploited by bad actors and the inability of even million-subscriber channels to reach a human in support should any of those problems suddenly destroy their livelihood. Fixing any one of those things won't make YouTube good, nor does it inspire confidence that by the time any of them are fixed they won't have some up with some new form of awfulness.
> because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay
People don't want to pay for half-baked products:
- Workspace accounts don't work
- Even with standard accounts, it won't work on many devices (eg. TV apps), so you still get ads even as you paid
- As Google regularly kills people's account, it also means most of us have multiple Youtube accounts that we check in different contexts, and paying for premium on all of them is way more of a commitment that you make it sound like.
nonsense. these are not anywhere in the top hundred issues with the service.
workspace accounts are irrelevant to 99.99% of normal users. google hasn't encouraged using workspace accounts for consumer use for like ten years. the only place people care is on hacker news.
> People don't want to pay for half-baked products:
This is disingenuous, to be blunt. People do not block youtube ads because workspace accounts don't work or because Google kills off niche products or that people lose youtube accounts when switching devices. Switching profiles is already considered an inconvenience, due to the way the algorithms tailor so well, regardless of how often you may engage in it.
The ad blocker problem is less people explicitely blocking ads on Youtube, than people blanket blocking ads everywhere. They'd need to white list Youtube to disable it for that specific case.
So the question is whether they really _want_ to pay for Premium or not, the ad-blocker will probably stay on either way.
> Switching profiles is already considered an inconvenience
I'm not following. For instance I have a work profile, my main profile on my phone (mostly due to paying for Google One + apps + a bunch of services on that specific account), and other profiles on my other devices (home laptop + ipad)
I absolutely do not want my work account to share my personal algorithmic recommendations, or my main account getting killed because of anything happening on other devices, including facturation issues.
Funnily enough, even as those accounts are separate, there's still cross-contamination of the algorithmic recomendations, probably because they share the same IP or geoloc.
People on HN seem to have very different experiences on Youtube than I do. Do people here actually like Youtube's video recommendations? Youtube is my go-to example I give when I need to explain to people why algorithmic recommendations generally don't work well.
> People do not block youtube ads because [...]
I'll take a hardline position on this -- if Youtube Premium was free, it would not be worth using it to watch Youtube videos. The cost is not actually the main issue. The product itself is inferior to using 3rd-party tools.
I spent a decently long time paying for Youtube Premium because I wanted to pay for content, and deliberately not using it anyway because I also wanted to have a decent viewing experience. I can't speak for other people, but for me at least when I talk about the quality of the service, it's not an excuse. I deliberately paid for a product and I still didn't use it; that's how much I disliked it.
> Switching profiles is already considered an inconvenience, due to the way the algorithms tailor so well, regardless of how often you may engage in it.
The dealbreaker for me with YouTube Premium is that I'd have to sign into YouTube. And I'd need uBlock Origin anyway to block all the suggested video divs...
>People do not block youtube ads because workspace accounts don't work
Ohh me! Me! I do!
I was one of those people stupid enough to go along with Google Plus when it was still a thing. I had no problem with my account for that but didn't want my real name associated with my YouTube browsing habits. So I used the option that allowed me to keep my username in YouTube. Fast forward a few years and Google Plus goes away and somehow my YouTube account is some kind of brand account and Google needs me to verify that I am of age somehow. (As if they don't have this information already) But no matter what I do now somehow I need my administrator's account to approve my ability to watch YouTube uncensored.
So to make a long story short, after trying things constantly and getting no where I created an account for just YouTube videos and spam emails. I have absolutely no interest in giving Google any more than I absolutely have to in order to keep watching and will never give them money for YouTube. The whole thing is broken with no way to loop in an actual human being. Hell I even had people blaming me saying it was my own fault for using G+ (as if it was truly optional at the point this happened.)
>Even with standard accounts, it won't work on many devices (eg. TV apps), so you still get ads even as you paid
I really don't think this is true. I can't think of any official YouTube app where this won't work - across mobile devices, smart TVs, streaming boxes/sticks, games consoles.
I assume it got better with time, the main issue being that it needs to be dealt with client by client.
I tried a year ago and it was a miserable experience outside of the phone/computer browser landscape. I actually hope what you're saying is true, while also fearing that the next platform adding a youtube client will hit the same issues for the first X months until someone does something about it.
What? YT Premium doesn’t block ads on the TV apps? Really? If that’s true, they will never see a cent from me. I was on the fence, mainly since my usage varies a lot month to month in rather unpredictable ways. If YT Premium means I still see ads on the 65” screen, then no way no how.
> Peer to Peer for streaming doesn't seem a reasonable alternative at any scale, since most people own phones and then laptops, and much fewer desktops.
Peer to peer streaming of the PeerTube type seems to work reasonably well. Unlike Mastodon, etc., you don't have to sign up to receive content. You just click on a URL and it works. What it doesn't offer is discovery. Nobody will find your stuff on PeerTube. They might follow links there.
I put metaverse tech demos on PeerTube.[1] Works fine, few views. No ads.
From user side Youtube discovery is almost completely broken anyway. I ended up removing both home feed and recommended videos block via extension because they didn't contribute anything besides frustration and page load time for a couple years now.
I learn about creators elsewhere and then look up and subscribe to their channel on YT. This flow will work just fine with p2p as long as creators have a video list and an rss feed anywhere on the internet and a single functioning search engine continues to exist.
This exactly, but even one step further - it’s time consuming and expensive to produce the videos themselves! Who’s going to create quality content if they can’t get paid for it?! This is the major value YouTube provides. They bridge the gap between consumers who don’t want to pay with producers that NEED to get paid.
Want free peer to peer streaming? Hard to build a content ecosystem on that.
Yes correct, for most streamers that I watch, YouTube seems to be an important part of their income. PeerTube will not magically create incentives for people to create content.
The problem is that YouTube consists of two fundamentally different services.
One is a content hosting service like Imgur. The people hosting the content are the users. If there are any expenses involved, it's a matter between them and the service provider. The audience doesn't use the service deliberately. They just go there because someone wants to show them something.
The other is a platform where people try to make money with the content they produce. The audience are the users, and it's fair to expect them to pay one way or another. I'm not personally interested in using that YouTube, because I seem to be incompatible with videos as a content format. Pretty much every YouTube video like that I've seen would have been better as a written article.
The comparison to imgur is interesting, as imgur is itself trying hard to make money now by removing lots of content. The history of image hosting websites is a history filled with image hosts failing for the exact same reason.
No, it's because we users no longer trust BigTech like Google to not be greedy and know that it is all about bait and switch.
They made "free" the norm on the internet as it increased the barriers for their competitors. Then started to show ads as nothing can be free for ever. And we users accepted that as a reasonable compromise with the belief that the ads will be limited. What happened? Bait and switch - from one to two to three banners in a page, from text ads to display ads to video ads, there was suddenly more ads than content on a web page. And the ads used more bandwidth than the content. Next came the assurance that our privacy wouldn't be compromised. Google pledged to "Do No Evil". What happened? Bait and switch - suddenly Google (or other BigTech) claimed that they just can't survive without personalised ads that need to be very privacy invasive. Now we are the products.
The bait and switch in Youtube (or any other streaming platform) is quite obvious - get us to pay for "ads free" video, and then suddenly introduce ads in the paid tier. Then offer another "ad free" tier for a higher price. No thanks, Google. We are not going to be fooled. Go ahead and introduce the anti-ad blockers - there is no way you are going to get me to pay to watch videos full of ads. Google's greed also needs limit. Especially when the user experience of most Google products have become worse.
This is exactly why I won't pay The Google a single nickel ever again. It would not surprise me in the least that, after all of this, they begin showing ads for Premium users and justifying it as being fewer ads than for free users. And I can't wait for their sycophants to come to their defense, shaming me for wanting "everything for free."
It's not about paid or free. It's about not trusting The Google, who I believe to be a bastard of a corporation. I pay for plenty of content creators on other platforms. But ads from The Google are the only way for anyone to make money? I don't buy it.
+1, I will pay for the removal of the adds but I couldn't care about YouTube TV or music. The price already feels too high but it's the one I don't rotate through compared to Netflix/Disney/Hulu/HBO which I watch a show then cancel.
I've said it before and I've said it again: ad-based content and pay content are incompatible business models. YouTube Premium fails because the content isn't worth paying for. The content is not worth paying for because it's been designed from the ground up to sell ads.
When a website designed to sell ads fails to sell content, that's not evidence that selling content doesn't work, it's evidence that selling content designed to sell ads doesn't work.
This is spot on. People assume Vimeo is the only competitor to YouTube, but that's wrong. Reddit is a perfectly fine competitor to YouTube in a sense that people don't really need the content to come in form of video.
No, just no.
Reddits poor quality commentaries that are mostly bots and teen trollers, do not compare to millions of hours of content from verified experts amd amateurs alike showcasing or explaining something of interest to the viewer.
Thats like compairing backroom gossip to news.
Sure both have their biases and inaccuracies, but at least one of them holds a resemblance of accountability as opposed to the other that can spew anonymous bogus crap at will. With zero consequence.
Reddit has very poor quality content.
And it keeos on getting worse. Its just too riddled with bots.
Imagine youtubes comment section without the videos. Reddit in a nutshell.
I think you're just not the audience. Most Millennials and early Gen Z/Zoomers grew up with YouTube and have long-term connections with tons of creators, communities, and groups of channels to watch it for hours a day if not >20 hours a week. For these users, paying for the privilege to access that content in an a-la-carte way without distractions is immensely valuable. Anecdotally, most of my friend groups pay for it in one way or another (e.g. splitting the cost of the subscription by using Google Families, or using the discounted student plan).
Ok, but one is far more likely to support a creator's patreon or personal website for exclusive content than pay for a heap of content that you are not enthusiastic about at best and is genuinely vile at worst.
No, I’m far more likely to just pay for the heap of content and watch/listen to the stuff I like than to pay for the Patreon of every single channel I watch and/or subscribe to. I’m at a point now where if I even slightly like a channel I’ll throw it in the subscription heap as a signal to YouTube to show me more of it. Conversely, there are two Patreons I support, one is on YouTube and the other is a webcomic.
I am a Millennial and I do feel connection to some creators. I am sad that I won't be able to watch the content anymore if Youtube blocks me. I will miss them and I will miss other cool content, like recorded conference talks and tutorial and stuff.
I did try Youtube without adblocker and it was unusable, and Google is horrible evil company that I am for sure not giving any money.
I'll miss it, but at the same time, Youtube is horrible time thief. It is bittersweet but it will make my life better to be without it. If I spent the time I have over the years wasted on Youtube instead reading books, hiking or working out, I'd be a much better person today.
YouTube is the most valuable and worth paying for video content I watch. And I subscribe to several streaming services in addition to YouTube premium. YT is the last one I’d give up. Not kidding.
YT premium is my only paid streaming and I'd simply stop watching youtube over going back to ads. I watch 2-3hrs of youtube a day and I'm glad that creators feel that YT premium revenue is a good source of revenue for them. Not their biggest, but a reasonable chunk.
I’m a full-time YouTuber. On a per-view basis, I earn slightly more from Premium views than from ad-watching views. (We’re talking tiny fractions of a cent, but they add up.)
Also, demonetized videos are still eligible for Premium revenue.
> demonetized videos are still eligible for Premium revenue.
Wow, TIL.
So you make more per view for a Premium subscriber. What about in total. What percent of your monthly profit is from Premium viewers vs Ad-watching viewers.
>YouTube Premium fails because the content isn't worth paying for.
I beg to differ. As a hobbyist type, and also someone interested in semi trashy niche content (true crime), having access to a virtually unlimited catalogue of fresh content, a lot of it exceptionally good quality, makes it absolutely worth the money.
If I could have any one subscription, it would be YouTube 10 times out of 10. And as someone who abhors advertising, I'm happy to pay.
I have YouTube Premium, it comes with YouTube music; I am perfectly happy paying for that as I consolidate music streaming with ad-free watching in my bed.
It replaced apple music and spotify for me; plus it gives me access to all sorts of music that is only released there as videos.
If I ever have to watch youtube with ads, I am going to just not YT at all.
If Youtube Premium actually blocked all the ads (including sponsored content), then I would pay for it. But it doesn't, so I have to use Sponsor Block anyway. Why pay for something that won't get the job done?
Yet third party YT apps skip these annoying video parts. Premium definitely feels like a huge step down if you suddenly see ads in every second video and you are not used to.
Sponsored content is regulated by Youtube's content policy like everything else on the platform, so it is in fact controlled by Youtube. The same way, the Youtuber's speech itself is controlled by Youtube, as shown by the recent “demonetize all the videos where people curse” (which generated much drama in the French Youtuber community, for cultural reasons).
Yeah, I'm the same. I spend hours on youtube, in fact we don't have any streaming or cables subscription and I don't miss it. The content is fantastic IMHO. I would pay for this one service. I'm actually seriously contemplating subscribing to it now, after all those many years of consuming it for free.
I'll drop a contrarian take.
I love youtube premium. The content I "comsume" (yech!) is well worth the 12ish dollars. I could skip ads with a blocker, I could join every creator's patreon, I could watch/listen in firefox on my phone, I could yt-dl the videos for offline play.. But none of that is as convenient*cheap as a premium subscription.
I agree with this. Subscriptions are one thing, but we are missing the obvious here: people don't want ads. No need to pay to remove them when you can just use an ad blocker.
tldr: the commons seems undervalued by individuals
You can just use an ad blocker, and don't get me wrong, I hate ads. But youtube ads don't load potentially malicious scripts (for now), and they provide the money that incentivizes this MASSIVE open self publisher friendly library of video data. So adblocker on youtube reminds me of leaving grocery carts in the middle of parking lots. Stores like Aldi solve this by requiring a quarter to use their carts, but that's incinvenient.
Also reminds me of the open source funding challenge. The commons requires individual buy in and conscientious support, something that seems to be on the decline because(?) no one wants to carry free riders.
The majority of my usage, and the usage of _many_ others based on the view count for DIY stuff, is watching people fix or build stuff. Usually because I'm in the middle of a project trying to figure out how to do something, or because I'm thinking about a project and wanting to get an idea of how difficult it'll be. Youtube University basically.
I pay for premium because it saves so much time, and I hate ads when I'm under a car trying to remember what bolt goes where.
The problem with this logic is whether or not your usage mirrors sustainable usage if you're selling content - and I'd argue it doesn't.
The useful uses of YouTube are basically a side-effect of the real usage which is "get eyeballs on the screen to watch the screen more" - which is what you want when you sell ads, whereas you kind of want the opposite when you sell subscriptions - subscribed users who use the service as little as possible are cost efficient users.
YouTube was just 18 months old when Google bought it and it had just started to fend off very costly copyright claims. It was popular, but 2006 popular.
YouTube Premium is the best thing I pay for each month (I actually don't pay for it it's included with Pixel Pass). It a little more than Apple Music and Spotify and you get that included into YouTube premium. YouTube has the largest music library out of any music streaming service. If you watch YouTube on a TV, YouTube premium is a must.
I switch between paying for streaming services on a regular basis, but YouTube Premium is the one that I stick with all the time. Lots of high quality content.
I've got youtube premium, nebula, curiositystream and I subscribe to various youtubers on floatplane.
And I've got to be honest – youtube premium is not really worth it. All the other services have high-quality content, because they're designed from the ground up for paying users.
Okay, so a lot of people are responding that they love YouTube content, and some of them pay for it.
Yes, obviously the largest crowdsourced video service in the world has some subscribers. But the fact is, they aren't enough subscribers to approach its ad revenue. If you don't address why that is, you're not really responding to my point.
Peer to peer using automated torrenting for video distribution of copyrighted media libraries has been reinvented and worked 3 separate times over the last decade (popcorntime, etc). It just doesn't work in the sense that as soon as it works and becomes popular it's attacked legally until it stops existing.
Popcorn time is again like Netflix, not YouTube. Serving 10k movies is a vastly easier problem than YouTube (The few gaming channels I watch have more video content length than the movies on Netflix)
It can't be the perfect showcase because the service isn't even great, let alone if you compare it to "any" alternative, for example, it doesn't even have proper offline downloads, which is available for free with an alternative
Even great compared to what? You need to cite services similar to YouTube (like Vimeo, whose pricing model will just not be acceptable to anyone at HN), not frontends to YouTube, who don't do any of the expensive backend work.
Part of the problem for me is that sponsor spots in videos are so common now that I feel forced to run SponsorBlock. If I'm already having to run one extension just to enjoy the experience, then I may as well also use Adblock and not even bother with Premium. But since premium doesn't give that full ad-free experience (referring to sponsors), I just don't see as much benefit.
The amount of my life I save by using adblock + sponsorblock when watching YouTube is such a huge amount of time. Maybe I am just cheap, but I also feel it's a bit on the expensive side of things for what you get.
I do however still like to support creators that I watch a lot, so I'll use things like Patron, or in the case of Linus Tech Tips, Floatplane. I feel like directly supporting the creators I spend a lot more time watching makes more of an impact on supporting the content I enjoy. Creators don't seem to get much out of YouTube Premium viewers.
YT kind of started a soft assault on sponsor spots, with mobile users getting two-tap fast-forward, and encouraging creators to use chapters, making them choose to either fake their audience out with inaccurate chapters, or to include a sponsor chapter and assume x% of viewers are not going to see the sponsor spot.
I hate ads, but I'm largely ok with sponsor reads. They are by far the least evil and least annoying.
They are not targeted (everybody watching the video sees the same ad... for now). They don't invade my privacy. They are usually fairly short. They're usually somewhat relevant to the creator, and therefore my interests. Of course, it depends on the creator. Some have more integrity, others less.
If between Youtube Premium, Patreon, and sponsored segments or episodes creators can make a living, that sounds great to me. Better than TV, radio, or the increasingly expensive and ad-ified streaming services. I'll take it.
Yeah, I'm pretty okay with sponsored segments. By and large, the people I watch only accept sponsors that appear to be legitimate, and the read is generally "here's this service and what it does, give it a try and thank them for feeding me this week!" Or "I've been using this service since they started and I think it's pretty cool"
They're generally not low quality scammy products or designed to extract money or spy (with the exception of VPN ads, but that's a different issue).
I'm alright with them. I tend to skip them more these days because I can only hear about Brilliant and Squarespace so many times in a day
I'm happy subscribing to creators' patreons or Kofi or whatever because almost all of my money goes to them.
Whereas on YouTube, most of my money or ad-generated money goes to Google. YouTube pays creators very little and treats them very poorly. There's a new adpocalypse every few months where YouTube will randomly change the rules, retroactively demonetize and delist videos, while offering no chance to appeal or even have videos reviewed by a person.
Without even considering Google's generally evil and monopolistic behavior, why would I ever willingly give them money?
YouTube's shitty treatment of creators is why every video now has a sponsored segment in the middle. They aren't paying enough and creators need additional income sources. YouTube can decide at any moment without notice to nuke your entire business and give you no option to recover. They keep shittifying the website with shorts and aggressive ads and dark patterns to drive up ad exposure, but this doesn't translate to higher pay for creators. In no circumstance is giving google more money going to fix any of the problems.
All a YouTube plus subscription gets you is YouTube will turn off the ads and dark patterns designed to force you to pay for the subscription. As well, I have exactly zero faith that YouTube won't also start showing subscribed users ads in a year or two.
You and your creators use yt as a service. Their servers and network. Payment and others. That services don't come for free.
If you don't give them any money, why Google need to provide the services?
If you don't like that, you can build your own server and steam from that.
Theyve also dominated the market with anti-consumer practices.
They should take responsibility for being the Internets video archive because they've faught so hard to become it and pushed everyone else out the market.
And I'd rather not use YouTube! I want nothing at all to do with google. They quite simply do not deserve my money.
How much money has google made on selling my data? What do I get in return? More ads. If I pay google to remove the ads, they still sell my data and they take my money directly. By playing the game at all, you can only lose. So to the extent that is possible, I don't play. I also feel exactly zero remorse for taking advantage of a company like google. Their practices are deeply unethical and harmful, being a monopoly is inherently bad, and stealing from them is an ethical net positive.
Don't be reductive, it makes you look uninformed. This is a much more complex issue than simply paying for bandwidth.
While I still use Youtube (for now, while adblockers work), the alternative is Rumble (or something Rumble like). The censorship/narrative control from Youtube(Google), along with the removal of the ability to "dislike" videos has resulted in site where it is difficult to sift through spam when it comes to non-controversial topics, and difficult to find what you are looking for if you are looking for information that may conflict with the current "official narrative" on disputed topics. It is very similar to the way Substack has become (for the most part) my alternative to magazine and "news" journals. Legacy platforms owned by corporate conglomerates still have a leg up when it comes to audience size and archival library size, but as far as content goes, they are rapidly falling behind.
The problem with YouTube premium is that it’s a music subscription service bundled with a video service. I have no interest in subsidizing the former to get the latter.
No, it perfectly showcases that people do not want to pay 1000% more money for the privilege of paying a monthly subscription.
Youtube Premium costs $12/month [1]. Ads average something like $2 per 1000 views to the creators (in some of the most common categories) [2]. Youtube takes a ~45% cut, so Youtube makes ~$4 per 1000 views from ads. So, to reach $12/month, you would need to average 3000 views per month. At a average of 30 days per month, you would need to consume on average 100(!) videos a day for Youtube to come out behind.
Wikipedia says Youtube made ~$28.8B in 2021 and had ~2.5B MAU as of the beginning of 2022. So, the average MAU only brings in ~$10/year. You need to average over 10x the number of views as the average MAU for Youtube Premium to come out behind for Youtube.
The actual alternative is that you charge a comparable price to the advertising revenue instead of complaining that it does not work because your consumers are not dumb enough to pay a 1000% markup.
I don't think you're taking everything into consideration here.
For one it's not only creators who make money. You also have to pay for hosting/development as well as Google's own profit. So the cost to buy ads is clearly greater than $2 per 1000.
I just looked and apparently the cost to buy 1000 views is about $20. So your off by 1000% yourself.
At that rate premium is priced equivalent to 600 views a month or 20 a day. Which doesn't sound absurd to me for someone who uses it as their main source of screen time.
Remember ad views /= video views. There may be 4 ads per video which mean we're talking about watching 5 videos per day.
How many ads would you see in a day watching cable?
If you only use it a few times a week to look up the odd tutorial or something then it's probably not worth it.
For anyone who watches hours everyday it seems a no brainer. I reckon the only reason people aren't buying is because of habit. They're used to ads so a subscription seems outrageous. With Netflix they're used to a subscription so an ad seems outrageous.
Or maybe the people being outraged are different people, I dunno.
I already accounted for all of those factors. The $2 per 1000 views was the estimated revenue from a video with 10 million views. That presumably accounts for the number of ads delivered over the average watch time of the video. The creator averages $2 per 1000 views which is their 55% cut of the ad revenue [1]. That averages out to around $4 per 1000 views in ad revenue paid to Youtube of which Youtube keeps 45% which is ~$2 and the creator keeps 55% which is also ~$2. Unless the "net revenue" they are mentioning is not actually the gross ad revenue from the ads, this logic is sound.
I have no idea where you are getting the $20 per 1000 views number from as no source is given. I have no private information on the topic as I do not run ads on Youtube or run a Youtube channel, but that does not seem to conform to any of the publicly disclosed information from Youtubers that I have ever seen in common entertainment categories. As seen in the video I showed, a channel targeting Finance does average ~$20 per 1000 views, but those are relatively narrow demographics and nowhere near the most common content. Do you have a advertising account on Youtube and the $20 is the number you are being quoted for a ad campaign? If so, is it targeting a high value, competitive demographic? Otherwise, what is the source of the $20 per 1000 views number?
You are discussing how much money content creators get paid for impressions.
The other person is discussing how much advertisers spend to for impressions.
In the middle is Google, which has it's own costs. If you are going to pay Google to not show you ads it makes more sense to base that off of the amount of revenue it would have generated from advertisers instead of the amount of revenue it pays to content creators on your behalf.
Again, Youtube splits ad revenue 55% to the creator and keeps 45% for themselves. The $4 per 1000 views number I am stating is the money advertisers are paying Youtube unless the term “net revenue” they are using in their revenue sharing FAQ does not mean the the incoming revenue from the ads. I am fairly certain that if they were deducting their cost of delivery from that number then net revenue would not be a correct term and they would need to disclose it as gross profit or some other non-revenue term. As a result, I believe my statement that Youtube is getting ~$4 per 1000 views from advertisers is a accurate representation of the information I have presented.
You've skipped paying additional rightsholders - subscription music rights are substantively more expensive than advertising funded ones. You've no processing fees.
That is a good point. It is probably not fair to average globally.
Looking for some US only numbers [1]. It seems reasonable to estimate the US as having ~200M MAU. The revenue numbers reported there are ~$11B, ~$15B, ~$20B globally of which ~$2.5B, ~$3.5B, ~$4B were US only. So, the US was ~25% going down to ~20% globally.
If we extrapolate that forward at 20% (which likely overestimates the US share which was decreasing over the reported period) then the ~$28B in the current year would have ~$6B in US revenue over 200M users which is around $30 per year. This is 3x the number I originally calculated of $10 per year. This still results in 400% revenue for Youtube Premium over the average ad-supported user.
That’s not how advertising work. Most of the time, the goal is to create/increase brand awareness, then when you have to buy something you will consider these brands, possibly in a more favorable way.
If I'm aware a brand is wasting money to make me waste my time, money that furthermore will affect their product prices, you can be sure I'm never buying anything from this brand unless there is no alternatives (in which case they don't need awareness)
The best examples are the subscriptions advertised on podcasts, which are invariably venture backed and remarkably shitty. How are the hosts so excited to get their memtal health records leaked!? (€£¥$)
only ad I ever clicked on was a Swedish guy selling human meat for consumption.
"Eat a Swede" a company in the lab grown meat space.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE-z6DQv5yg
But yes Ads are more about brand awareness than to actually get you to buy stuff.
On the one hand, it seems sensible that, if you want to grow your own human muscles, the best thing to eat would be human muscles. On the other hand, for purposes of maintaining and repairing the muscles you already have, the nutrient profile you want is probably pretty different from that, and likely there are animals whose meat matches that profile more closely.
The vast vast majority of people, including most people who think they don’t. Keep in mind a typical CTR for YT would be 0.5-3% so if you clicked 1 in 100 ads out of curiosity, you’re a median clicker. The second half of your question would take a long time to answer, sorry.
Also, if you look at content creators who share their revenue, they actually make more money from Premium subscribers than they do from ads. So if people want to really support content creators, then subscribing to Premium is the best option.
But what’s my time worth, not sitting through ads each month? If I make $12/hr, and I have to watch 120 30sec ads in a month of watching YouTube, I’ve broken even.
I think most of us make a bit more than 12/hr… so it quickly becomes worth it.
Obviously, that is why I specifically framed it in terms of Youtube's revenue generation. Youtube provides a ad-supported option and a paid option, except they charge 10x the rate for the paid option. Yet for some reason, the argument is always that nobody likes paid options or "microtransaction" models when the obvious problem with almost every scheme that companies try is that they always try to markup by like 1000% at a minimum.
IMO That's the wrong question. The question is rather is the premium 'enough' to make it worth it to buy it or just stay with ad blocking as we did years before that option.
Apart from the excellent points raised by u/12907835202 in a sibling comment, another important consideration is that YT premium consumers are disproportionately rich compared to the entire YT consumer base. So if you are taking averages, you have to multiply them by at least 3x (i.e. 300%) to account for higher CPMs due to higher conversion values expected from such demographics.
This is the trap Musk was trying to walk Twitter in to with pay to remove ads.
Advertisers are paying a lot more to show ads to exactly the people that might pay to remove ads, wealthy people, especially US people.
The break even price for the subscription has to be much higher than the average revenue per user (globally ~1/10th of US revenue per user), and has to be higher than the average revenue for US users because of much higher advertising spend per user on that demographic.
So in order to not see ads, I must outbid companies who want to show me ads against my wishes. And like any protection scheme, being willing to pay makes you a bigger target. This is why adblockers are the only moral choice.
I say the real moral choice is not to consume that content. Using adblockers is akin to stealing, just because you are not willing to pay the price providers want to charge you.
When youtube.com sends me an HTML file full of links to videos, I am stealing nothing by ignoring some of those links and only watching the videos I care about.
I have no moral obligation to waste my time according to Google's preference.
You are freeloading no matter how much sophistry you try to cloak it with. They haven’t yet started enforcing their terms of service as strictly as they could but what you’re doing is no different from someone hopping the fare gate on a subway or bus and claiming it’s okay because the bus was going to run either way.
> You are freeloading no matter how much sophistry you try to cloak it with.
I'm not trying to cloak anything - of course it's freeloading. So what? We're all freeloading, all the time, on all the millions of things millions people have made and given away over the internet. Google didn't make those videos they're sharing, after all - they got that stuff for free!
If Google decides they no longer want to participate in the sharing economy, that's their business.
> what you’re doing is no different from someone hopping the fare gate on a subway or bus
There is no fare gate on this subway. There are no toll collectors; there are no tolls. Everyone rides for free. This transit network is paid for by the vendors running shops inside the stations, who hope to profit from the foot traffic. They can hope all they want that I will make purchases in their stores on my way to and from the train - but maybe I'm just not going to.
> We're all freeloading, all the time, on all the millions of things millions people have made and given away over the internet. Google didn't make those videos they're sharing, after all - they got that stuff for free!
This just isn't true. You're not freeloading if you use the service as designed – ad-supported services became predominant because that was the easiest way to reliably get enough revenue to run a business. Google pays roughly half of the ad revenue to people who make YouTube content, which may or may not be what you consider fair but it's definitely not free.
> > what you’re doing is no different from someone hopping the fare gate on a subway or bus
> There is no fare gate on this subway.
That's the ads – the terms are that you either watch ads or pay directly. When you bypass the ads, you're breaking that arrangement and depriving everyone of the money they would otherwise have earned. Now, you can argue that they get enough anyway but that's exactly the logic that people use to hop a fare-gate trying to claim that all of the other passengers are taking care of the cost. If that's who you want to be, just admit it.
> the terms are that you either watch ads or pay directly. When you bypass the ads, you're breaking that arrangement
Well, that's where we differ: you think there's an arrangement, which obligates you to support Google's profit model, and I simply don't. I never agreed to any terms, and other people's businesses are not my responsibility.
Do you feel obligated to buy a block of cheese after you eat the free sample on the tray at the grocery store?
YouTube has terms of service which you agreed to by continuing to use it. This article is about stricter enforcement of those terms so the only change is that you might soon be unable to pretend otherwise.
The cheese sample analogy breaks down as soon as you think about it. Unlike watching ads on YouTube, the samples are offered without any willing agreement to make a purchase but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other terms. For example, if you try to show up to the store naked or drunk you’ll be asked to leave because, like YouTube, it’s private property and the business has no obligation to provide service to people who don’t follow their terms. Similarly, you’d be refused entry if you started taking all of the samples or standing around shouting about how bad the cheese is. That store probably has a bathroom, but if you’re not a customer you aren’t allowed to use it.
All of this is conceptually very similar to that YouTube offers videos to people who watch ads (or pay) but the difference is that most people understand that it costs money to make physical things. Digital content has been ad supported for so long that many people think of it as free and are unwilling to even consider other models.
If you an tell me a way to teleport to an alternate reality without YouTube, I will take it. In this reality, 90+% of videos are hosted on YouTube simply due to network effects.
And yes, public transit should ideally be free to the passengers too - fare collection and enforcement is a giant waste of money when the whole thing is already largely funded via grants.
In both cases, yes, there are arguably better models but you get those by working for them, not freeloading.
For example, it’s easy to avoid YouTube but you’re supporting YouTube’s continued dominance by using it – even with an ad blocker, you’re contributing to views and likely engaged social activity which drives more traffic to YouTube, and for that matter there are a surprising number of people here contributing PR to YouTube pro bono by claiming there’s no alternative, which isn’t true but certainly what they want advertisers and creators to think.
Similarly, I also agree that there is a lot of unhealthy history around transit fares but dodging them does not build support for lowering them. You get that by working in the political process first and riding for free after that isn’t actively harmful for the service.
Picture an alternative universe where all transit was ad supported and everyone has to watch an ad before you can get on a bus. That or pay $1000 a month for free no-ad transit anywhere in a city.
Except there are some people with ad-blockers who can get on their bus immediately and always get to their destination earlier because of that, being more productive and mentally healthy throughout their life as a consequence of not watching ads every day of their life. All without paying $1000 a month.
People who dutifully watch ads (let's call them ad-watchers) think the ad-blockers are freeloaders and that they - the ad-watchers - are doing the difficult right thing by watching obtrusive long useless braindead ads every day since it supports the finances of the entire transit system. And that the ad-blockers are essentially stealing and should pay the $1000 a month if they want the ad free version.
The ad-blockers believe they are fighting a system they believe is harmful and want changes and argue they are using ad-blockers in a sort of protest as is their civil right. The ad-blockers point out they would rather have a system where customers can each rapidly pay for transit at a reasonably low fare and that $1000 a month is outrageous. Moreover that the advetisement saturation to support the transit system is likewise harmful, useless and inefficient and that there is a better way that will make everyone happy. They further argue that due to monopolies and network effects ad-blocking is the only option for anyone to easily protest as there are no private transit companies that have been able to gain the capital and infrastructure necessary to compete with the ad-supported transit hegemony.
The ad-watchers scoff and tell the ad-blockers that no matter how much sophistry they try to cloak it with to falsely paint themselves as protestors - what they are doing is no different from stealing and they are just lucky the transit system hasn't started more rigidly enforcing its terms of service.
Not just rich, they likely consume YT significantly higher than normal crowd, thus higher cost for Google to serve them. If someone watches 1 video a day in YT, they likely won't think of getting a subscription.
You can still sell those users' more valuable usage data and they've even coughed up a bunch of personal information to setup payment and have signaled that they have money and are willing to pay for things. So in return for paying they get no ads on this particular platform while getting a target painted on their back.
And if you need more money later you can just convert youtube premium from a no ads platform to a less ads platform. You just have to do it slowly so not to many people bail at once because the pot got to hot to fast
It's even worse, as they actively degrade the features you use.
With movies and music in the mix, international licensing agreements needs to be respected.
In short, I paid for YouTube premium to avoid ads. Then I travelled to another country where YouTube didn't have licensing rights for all of their movies and music, so my premium account was just disabled completely and I got ads again.
You can fix that with a VPN service, or by creating your own VPN network. You could buy a Digital Ocean droplet in your location and connect to that like a VPN.
Are you asking people to pay additional money to a third party service so that they can continue to use a service they have already paid for and should be fixed by that service provider in the first place? Don't you think this is ridiculous?
After you pay for the music rights for a subscription video service the cost base is identical. As you could use YouTube as a music streaming replacement service (and literally millions of people do) then the labels charge for the same license.
This could easily be fixed by paying the creators a much larger per view fee whenever a premium user watched their content. 1cent per view is 10$/cpm, that is 3-6 times more than what ads pay and would strongly incentivise creators to encourage subscribers go premium and create premium-only content for them. Now you can't do that because premium is a ghost-town and you lose ad revenue, but if, say 25% of users are premium then it starts to make financial sense.
Your suggestion to cut the price is unlikely to strongly increase premium subscriptions, YouTube has probably already set it to a revenue maximizing value.
Giving them my card data feels more expensive than $12/month. The model of paying to remove ads always felt like hostage taking.
"Is this ad annoying enough for you? No? You think you're a tough guy? Here's an advert of me slicing off your toes. Now tell me your home address so I can mail them to you. Read me the CVV2 numbers from the back of the card to make it stop!"
Sure. I wouldn't recommend it for archival. I would recommend it for downloading a few videos before a trip when you expect flaky/slow internet. Much more convenient than the youtube-dl dance I did before. Ymmv.
I'm a premium subscriber but the background playback thing is a pretty insulting idea to me. They can save like 95% of the bandwidth if I'm listening to something audio-only. So why make it part of the more expensive option?
Even if it's a business decision, so what? It makes perfect sense, Youtube cant charge advertisers for video ads played when the app is in the background.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted, that’s true. I paid my Android TV $2000 and guess what? They added ads on the Home!
Google sucks and there’s no way I’ll directly give them money, ever again.
I think a smart TV home screen showing you things you might consider watching on services you probably already subscribe to is in bounds. A bit like calling menu items at a restaurant advertising.
This is just smart TV's in general. I have "The Frame" TV from Samsung and was super disappointed when I realized they put non-removable ads on the home page. Mostly from Disney+ which I don't even subscribe to. This is after I went through and spent an hour disabling their built-in autoplay cable-over-internet feature.
Youtube premium also includes other features, such as ability to download videos to view offline (e.g. flights).
But I also feel like you have an incorrect unstated assumption: People are not perfectly rational. The difference between paying $0 and paying $1 is ENORMOUSLY bigger than the difference between paying $1 and $12.
C.f. people will spend hours finding the perfect app that is also free, instead of just paying $2 for the perfect app they found after 2min. It doesn't make any sense.
I don't judge you, but when I actually can pay for a product that is as good as (or better) than pirated, then I don't mind paying.
For youtube I can. So I do. It's just a shame that so many industries give you a worse product than what you can pirate for free. I actually am willing to pay.
If I could pay the creators for what they make on YouTube, I would do so relatively cheerfully.
I have zero interest in giving money to a company that is actively trying to undermine everyone's privacy and security in the service of its own profit.
It's not only about the markup imo. I share netflix and all with my girlfriend in the same household. But for YouTube we both need our own premium because of the weird limits. More than that I would likely need 2 for me alone because of the limits. Even more because I organized my abos in different accounts.
I would buy one, but I won't buy 3. And I won't buy even 1 when I still have ads every so often.
What weird limits ? What ads ?
I'm sharing the yt premium with my whole family with no issues, and the only ads I see are the sponsoring from content creator directly in the video, but nothing from google
Only one device being able to hear music at once? Only 2 or so being able to watch movies at once? YouTube app and browser on the same device already being 2 devices. And yes with ads I mean sponsored ad blocks from the creators. Before I had these blocked I unsubbed more people than I subbed because of minute long VPN ads
Guess I'm dumb, because I've been subscribed to YouTube premium for quite a while now. I watch it on many devices that don't have any way of installing ad-blockers (like streaming devices to TVs). Not to mention, that an "ad" on YouTube has no time limit. I remember back when I didn't subscribe of seeing an ad for marble countertops that lasted over 45 minutes. Seriously. So if I just put on a bunch of videos to watch that may be like 10 minutes each, in between may be a 45 minute commercial that I have to go and physically hit the skip button. Sometimes I like to fall asleep listening to soothing videos, only to be hit with a fricken 45 minute commercial that's LOUD in between.
Sure, guess I'm dumb. But I don't care. Subscribing gets me what I need.
When looking at these numbers you have to remember that they are global numbers. Ads in rich countries like the US will make them way more money per user than the ads in poor countries. And YouTube Premium is also far cheaper in poor countries - it's like $2/mo in India, which probably pretty accurately reflects how much an average user draws in in each country.
YouTube premium also includes a music service with near peer features to Spotify/Apple music. On its own that’s worth $5-$10 a month. There’s also other features like offline downloads and background audio for podcasts.
Ad removal is just one feature amongst many with YouTube premium. So it’s not fair to compare the subscription price entirely against the CPM of the adverts you don’t have to watch.
I'd disable my adblocker and revanced youtube if they stopped randomly terminating channels unreasonably and gave them proper means to contest wrongful terminations. If Google respects the people making a living off of them (mainly off superchats and memberships, not ads) so little, they don't deserve my respect either.
I'll just keep up with the inevitable cat and mouse game with adblockers.
The trouble with YouTube premium is that there are still ads. Every YouTuber I watch does paid promotions, submarine marketing or self-promotion. That happened when YT ad revenue was reduced but even if ad rev went back up, it will continue. The marketing relationships are there now and who would turn down exrtra cash.
My problem with youtube premium is that it doesn't remove ads. Most of the videos I watch on the platform have multiple in-video segments with advertisements directly from the video author. Youtube can easily solve this, considering the community-driven plugin SponsorBlock does it so effectively. But they are happy to charge you the premium fee and let you sit thru intrusive ads.
"YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay (And I am not talking about too broke to pay cases)."
If this is true, and I have long believed it is, then the following, from the article, is a lie:
"It looks like you may be using an ad blocker. Ads allow YouTube to stay free for billions of users worldwide," the message adds.
If YouTube does not "stay free" then it shrinks to a small fraction of its current size.
So-called "tech" companies know users will not pay. This is not surprising since so much of the "content", none of which the "tech" company produces, is garbage. The stuff that goes "viral", that generates the most ad revenue, is not stuff people are going to pay for.
Either the "tech" company's website/app is free and a Trojan Horse by which its users can be spied on, or the "tech" business model isn't worth much of anything. Like someone said, "You are the product." Not the stuff uploaded by so-called "creators", YouTube's unpaid workforce.
"Ads allow YouTube to stay free for billions of users worldwide."
YouTube has to be free or it won't be able to continue operation. It's wonderful experiment, all this uploaded video, if we ignore all the surveillance Google is conducting and all propaganda and worse videos Google is forcibly putting in front of people, but this is not something many people with pay for. YouTube cannot convert "billions of users wordlwide" into paying subscribers.
Google might gain my favour if they become human again. Google is literally the most robotic company out there. There is so much they could do to make YT a better experience. But it suffers from developeritis, where it’s just a fancy tech stack (bravo!) but it wasn’t build for actual humans.
On one of my google accounts, and only if I am logged in.
For about 80% of my youtube watching experience this works.
But there are times I am logged in with my work account as (at the least) the primary account and I dont bother switching.
Or a random tutorial video I am looking at from a new laptop or untrusted device.
The pain of logging in outweighs looking at a couple of ads in the moment. So dont think that premium is a failed model based on usage. I certain I am not alone in engaging with youtube in a non-premium capacity despite having a subscription.
For me, text is fine. I'm a minority but I just avoid videos altogether.
Paying youtube for an infinite catalogue of shit? No thanks. And the rare gems that do interest me are invariably... overly expanded and filled with sponsor bullshit, so, ads.
Paying for YT premium to give Google their pound of flesh, only to be stuck in same horrorshow of well-meaning content creators having to whore themselves out to their sponsors... To me that means that the only winning move is not to play.
YouTube premium costs in Germany €15,99, which is more than Disney+ and AppleTV+ combined. I personally just don’t see the value in paying so much for it, considering all the other subscriptions that we have.
Uh, go to peering.google.net. See their “GGC” google global cache nodes. Those are all in-ISP. YouTube arguably has a larger in isp cache network than Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, …etc combined.
Id argue a large amount of YouTube’s traffic is cacheable.
- Stop promoting the front-page trash that is 'trending'
- Allow me to permanently filter music by genre or remove sports entirely
- Fix the recommendations engine to actually work
- Allow grouping/filtering subscriptions
Unless it does all of the above, there's no way I'm paying. Ads are an annoyance (and as others have said, most videos now run their own sponsorships/ads inside the video as well), but not having a well functioning 'application' in the first place means there's nothing worth paying for.
If I was given some assurances of what I was paying for, sure, I wouldn't mind paying a few bucks a month to get access to YouTube. Right now, I'm not willing to pay for a platform that is operated so poorly:
* Content is prioritized and screwed with too often. Videos that have no business anywhere near front-page or that are overall not well received are promoted because of shady backdoor deals with media companies. This is why late night talk show content is on the front page. I do not want to pay to support this.
* Content I have opted into seeing is suppressed, censored, etc. Creators that I enjoy have to modify how they make videos because of obscure and virtually unexplained reasons that YouTube mostly hand waves away as "the AI does a thing". They do not properly staff any kind of human review. The only way creators get their accounts back after the system goes completely haywire is by complaining on Twitter or other platforms and those without a megaphone get lost to the broken system. I am not interested in paying to support this.
* Basic features like comments have serious problems with them. The community has to attempt to hodge-podge together solutions while a multi-billion dollar company fails to do anything or provide the tools to stop rampant scams of a few basic types from ruining the comment section. I do not want to pay to support this.
* Features are randomly removed or subject to strange choices like the dislike button because a few people at YouTube think they know what the massive billions of people on the platform is best for them. I don't want to pay to support this.
Give me the option to pay and be free from these terrible choices YouTube makes and you can have my entire wallet.
At least for me, YouTube premium does not work because I do not want Google to save everyting I watch, that's why I use it as unlogged. I already have a gmail account, I use Google search, therefore Google has already quite amount of data about me, let's just not have it my Youtube history also.
When Youtube arrived first, I had an account with some playlists, then Google decided to merge account and asked me to switch a google account in order to keep my youtube account, that was the time I decided not to have an account on Youtube and subscribtion requires an account.
Also for subscriptions generally, thing are getting wild. There are several paid video / streaming services. Just to be able to watch 3 or 4 shows requires almost being subscribed to all streaming services, which is both expensive (at least for some part of the world) and ridicilous.
For me, 480p is not even modest, it's close to the height I get for a landscape video when holding my phone in portrait.
I also don't usually need the extra pixels, as there is seldom important content in the fine details — a few years ago, when I was prepping to leave the UK but not everything lined up to the same dates, I was using PAYG mobile for home internet and therefore set the videos to 240p; the only reason that didn't really work was that not all videos had such low resolution, and when they didn't the site defaulted to 720p.
We don't REALLY know that. If adblockers are effectively blocked, we might see an increase in people paying. The big value add of Premium was something people here were taking for granted because that "feature" was available for free.
Anecdotal but I knew a few people who are paying for it because of Apple TVs and iPhones where it's less trivial to block the ads on the apps.
> YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay
Absolutly wrong. I pay for spotify to not have ads, I pay for netflix despite the fact I can download torrents because of the benefit of the service. Hell, I pay for Telegram premium and chatgpt, both of which have very good free offer without ads!
But GAFAMS have exhausted our trust, so they don't get the same treatment.
I will never pay for a Google service, because that would mean having a google account tie to a payment system. And Google spies, collect data, close accounts and services on a whim and has terrible support.
It doesn't respect their customers, and so they lost our will to give them money.
Plus, even if you pay, you have no way to know if they are going to respect their own contract anymore because they don't care and have no consequence for messing up.
You pay for an amazon product? Can be a scam and amazon will not prevent that. You pay for twitter blue to see less ads? We just learned this month tweeter blue users say exactly as many ads as regular users.
> So what is the alternative?
We don't want an alternative. Those companies made billions with their short term abusing policies, now they finally pay some price.
Good.
For once the market is behaving as a regulating force as it should, which is not often nowadays.
A model where the uploader pays. Vimeo pro plans have something like that.
This idea that uploading is free artificially created by big data and somehow we think that's the way it should be. But really it's just their strategy, get as much data in then tax those who want to access it, even forgetting about the whole ML angle it's very simple to understand.
The model would work, it just needs to be properly implemented. I guess it's hard when YouTube etc. keeps people accustomed to not even rock bottom prices but completely free stuff.
1) Don't want Youtube to connect me to my real identity.
I browse incognito, or using alt IDs.
2) Many creators I follow are demonetized.
Why should I reward Youtube ?
If I want to pay, I would rather pay them directly.
It's their content that I watch.
3) I have seen a Ton of financial scams for targeting poor people using the names of Credible Top Brands in the country .
The fact that Youtube approves such shady Ads doesn't feel right to me.
What's the alternative ?
Instagram Reels and TikTok already rule short form videos.
If they can introduce a better Search Experience and a Long Form Video product, there will be a credible competitor to Youtube.
I strongly disagree Netflix isn’t a comparable alternative as it enables me to watch moving pictures to occupy my time. Worse YouTube gets their movies for free.
I understand that they are in a bind. Not my problem, however.
> YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay
I'd argue exactly the opposite, since over 25 million people pay for YouTube Premium.
Is it weird that this makes me want to subscribe to YouTube premium less than before? Feels like I've been poised to give them money for a while, since so many people seem to like the service. Now I feel like they're challenging me to a duel.
If Google didn’t have such a abysmal business model to start with, this wouldn’t be an issue.
They offered services for free without providing the disclaimer.
The attention economy is a toxic poison, I think more people than you realise are now aware of this and are less likely to pay for something Google offers because of it.
I don’t hate Google, but they’ve eroded a lot of trust.
I looked into subscribing because I don't mind paying to avoid the ads.
I don't like the spying that will go along with paying, given that it is Alphabet/Google. If they offered a plan to pay without the spying I would have signed up years ago.
I didn't try so I could be wrong but my guess is your payment will be tied directly to your login and so you need to have that login on the browser at all times to view the videos (without ads) and given all the decline of "do no evil" I don't trust them at all.
I also don't trust they wouldn't mess things up. I travel a lot. I paid for YouTube TV and the ludicrous junk they do to try and verify you are able to view things was a huge pain and failed quite a lot until it failed nearly always I and dropped it.
I imagine if they push me I will pay and then have to copy and paste every YouTube url into a sanitized browser instance only used for YouTube. But I don't trust Alphabet/Google to not constantly be attempting to use that subscription to improve and deepen their spying which annoys me quite a bit. I just trust them a tiny bit more than Microsoft (and I ditched using anything by Microsoft decades ago - other than my use of LinkedIn continuing after they bought it and very occasional uses of Bing to check on it).
You can delete your watch history after every session or have something automated do it for you. That will work fine if you only want to watch the content you subscribed to.
If you want better recommendations though you may have to tolerate some things that you may consider "spying".
Also cute these people think using incognito does anything to stop Google from tying the traffic back to them. They already finger print you off hundreds of parameters. Hell most people are literally using their web browser.
You'd also have to trust that YT doesn't track you in the incognito window, given that it's still pretty easy to identify an user and you're also most likely using Google's own browser to hide.
If you really don't want to be tracked by Google, you should probably consider not using their services.
I'm afraid you are making a mistake in assuming that Incognito mode == no tracking. The only thing that Incognito mode does is not save any local history or cookies. This is mainly of benefit for people who share a computer and don't want the other users to see their history.
Tracking has long moved way beyond cookies and Google is absolutely tracking what you do in incognito mode and doing their best (which is highly effective) to associate the tracking data with you.
This would mean YouTube will have to break compatibility with countless outdated Android / iOS apps, Smart TVs and other devices. Not gonna happen anytime soon.
> YouTube will have to break compatibility with countless outdated Android / iOS apps, Smart TVs and other devices
Minus smart TVs, this seems like the point of the policy change. (And even on the TVs, if they're watching without paying while blocking ads, that's purely a cost centre.)
If we enter Twitter as evidence into the record of yanking the cord on 3rd party apps getting a free ride off your company's hard work, then maybe Google has decided the negatives do not outweigh the positives.
You aren’t understanding. They can’t change the old unpublished APIs because it will break the old devices. We use those to get the videos without the ads.
What reason does YT have to NOT make changes that prevent those devices from working? Is there an avenue for these 3rd party devices to pay YT for their services? If these apps/devices are making a buck off of YT rent free, then they should be able to yank the cord whenever they want.
Your comment reads as if you feel that YT has some sort of obligation to continue letting 3rd parties make money from the work of YT without any compensation.
Device manufacturers not just use some private API or SDKs without making deal with Google. Except might be for Chinese noname brands from AliExpress.
All device manufacturers do have agreements with Google about support for their devices and such agreements can very well be for 10+ years or even for lifetime of the devices.
PS: Actually 10 years ago when Windows Phone was a thing Microsoft has tried to make their own YouTube client without agreement with Google and it was killed by Google almost immediately.
Google just dropped all third-party Google Home device support, leaving people with e.g. Lenovo Smart Displays twisting in the wind. It wouldn't be out of character for them to "alter the deal" w.r.t. all those old smart TVs and such.
i don’t think it’s weird, but i signed up for the premium trial a few weeks ago and it is simply astounding how much more enjoyable it makes things. i didn’t realize just how awful things had become until i tried youtube without ads.
i know some other folks are complaining about still getting tracked or whatever, but i think the simple truth is that youtube without ads is a vastly superior experience.
Last I heard, it was in the 10-50x range per view (premium vs. ad supported).
I watch enough YouTube for it to be a no-brainer for me, and I run an ad-blocker pretty much everywhere. Supporting the video creators I watch is worth it.
I signed up when it was first announced as YT Red years ago ("Member since October 29, 2015") and whenever I use a device without being logged in or I'm on an account without premium, I cringe. I can't believe people live that way. And we watch so much YouTube in this house, it's more than worth it for me, plus more cash to the creators.
I wish I got a discount for ALSO subscribing to YTTV and Google One... that'd be nice, but I'm not parting with YT Premium any time soon. It shows I've had > 790 hours of ad-free videos.
If you weren’t a paying customer, refuse to become a paying customer, and refuse to watch the ads, they don’t gain anything by having you as a user. It only costs them to retain you.
If doing something as simple as asking you to hold up your end of the deal of using their website (letting ads load for the ad-supported content) is too much to ask but paying for the website is also too much to ask, you have to be honest that you just want a free experience.
I don’t buy the argument that you were going to pay them in the future but you decided against it because they wouldn’t let you have it for free.
I wouldn't argue that the ads are terrible but it's what you agreed to by using an ad supported service. If you don't like their ad selection, the only ethical choice is either to pay for Premium or stop using YouTube. Watching someone's work without paying them isn't fair to the creators and it's a great way to ensure the market moves to worse content which is cheaper to produce.
I’m unmoved by the creators angle. Google exploits creators too. It’s best to just give them money more directly (like Patreon) than give Google money and hope they forward the creators a sensible amount.
If Google wants me off their service because I don’t watch enough ads, that’s their call. I’m not going to make a hufflepuff about it. But their ad game is garbage.
I’m not saying they’re great, but it’s a known quantity: you watch ads, advertisers pay Google, they pay creators. Yes, too much of that goes to the middleman but that’s a reason not to participate at all.
I had an issue with my payment for premium which resulted in temporary suspension of my service. A few days after fixing the payment issue, this news came out.
Considering this with the recent price increase, and some trouble with my family plan, my initial reaction was quite negative towards YouTube. They are setting a very clear trend against what I want in their service with recent changes (Removing downvote, removing android shortcuts and other features, aggressive copyright stiking policies, aggressive promotion of shorts, terrible recommendations).
I am considering cancelling. However, a more optimistic view would be that their ad block policy could result in lower subscription fees with more ad and subscription revenue.
That's crazy, the same thing happened to me. I was like what? Suddenly now my price has increased when I was on YouTube Red for the longest time. Considering canceling too
This has always been the case over in the world of freemium games.
The vast majority of the playerbase (70~80%?) are Free2Players (F2Pers), while the rest are whales (paying players) and an even smaller subset of them are space whales who spend enough in a month to buy a luxury car or two.
The games go to great lengths to retain those F2Pers because they are the ones the whales and space whales play together with and/or against. No F2Pers, no whales, no game, no business.
I think YouTube should take a similar approach and try to extract more from high value users to cover the costs of low value users. It’ll be easier to get a few thousand extra dollars from a music fan by bundling live interaction/events into YouTube than squeezing more ads into the bottom 1%.
I took the parent's comment to mean they would rather 'free' viewers leech off other people's bandwidth, as if they're not Premium and not watching ads, they are just consuming bandwidth and costing resources.
If they go to a competitor and block ads and consume bandwidth, then they are actively costing the competitor rather than costing Youtube for hosting.
Youtube allowing competitors to host would just consume youtube's bandwidth but with the 'views' also going to the competitor's domain (so the competitor could then potentially get additional sponsor support for having 'eyeballs' on their domain).
My point is that they intentionally obtained an effective monopoly on content, so it's weird of them to complain about too many people wanting to watch content there.
Ehh the problem with this is that I don't block YT ads (I watch on a tablet), but I am still constantly bombarded (and I mean that) with full-page click-through ads, banners and in-feed blocks trying to get me to buy Premium.
YouTube, I'm watching your pre-roll and mid-roll ads like you want me to, so leave me the fuck alone with this premium shit, I'm not interested.
So it's not an "either-or" scenario.. If you are using the ad-supported experience, they still disrupt it (many times a session for me) with UI-interfering elements to try to convert you. And that sucks.
I never said that them advertising their product was the problem. Please read more carefully.
If they advertised it with regular in-video ads like the rest of the ads, sure no problem, I am used to sitting through those and I accept ads as part of a good free viewing experience..
But they constantly interfere with the standard UI layout and experience to push these repetitive intrusive ads on me, that I have closed probably hundreds of times.
They should know by now that I am not going to sign up for it, so why continue to degrade the experience for me, when I am watching their ads as a free user?
They don't do this on the website so don't tell me "that's part of the trade" because it's only in the app they do this so aggressively and repeatedly.
>... you have to be honest that you just want a free experience.
No, I want an experience that commits to showing the ad(s) up front and not interrupting the video with more ads in the middle.
I use YT primarily for music. I don't mind letting ads play at the beginning. It's when they inject them into the middle of a song and, suddenly, when I'm jamming out, RIGHT at the peak of the track when I'm having the most fun, two more ads suddenly start blaring, and I'm forced to let the first one ride for 30 seconds.
There is some music that you just can't easily access anywhere but on YT for a variety of reasons. It's what keeps me using YT, but that approach of ad injection is bullshit.
Edit: Concert videos, too. Their algorithm will slap ads in the middle of a song, rather than in between them. I absolutely would not mind an ad here and there between songs, but noooooo.
> No, I want an experience that commits to showing the ad(s) up front and not interrupting the video with more ads in the middle.
Of course you would, and of course YT and its creators earns significantly more if they show ad in the middle. Not 100% sure, but AFAIK content creator could disable ad in the middle if they want to.
It absolutely does not cost them to retain you. That’s a joke. The current model completely offsets the number of users with ad-blockers by such a margin it’s silly we’re even talking about it.
The only reason we are talking about it is because shareholders want the money printer to go brrrrrr. YouTube IS profitable. Can we stop pretending one of the richest companies in the world needs me to stop blocking their ads for any reason other than greed?
And that principle is what most people balking here have a problem with.
They gain a lot thanks to network effects. Non-paying customers contribute to viewing numbers and engagement (likes + comments + subscriptions). But most importantly, they bring others to the platform by sharing links to videos and discussing them with others.
See [1]:
> In 2013, the boss of Time-Warner (which owns HBO), Jeff Bewkes, declared that piracy was: “Better than an Emmy” because more people watching the show inevitably led to more people deciding to pay for subscriptions.
Public goodwill is a thing. Also, their offer was lackluster. But with Youtube Music being a part of Premium and getting better and better overtime, more and more people are actually on the lookout for signing up.
There's also a psychological aspect of it. Remember how it feels when you're just about to do something and someone told you that you have to do it? Taking the agency and initiative away tend to annoy people and have an adverse effect on the task. You might not be personally affected by it but it's a common thing.
> more and more people are actually on the lookout for signing up
Supposedly they have over 80 million subscribers so they're definitely not hurting[0].
I am interested in seeing what happens if/when over 50% of users in the US subscribe to it. Advertisers are losing out on probably their biggest consumer market: people with enough money to handle a $12/mo subscription. Perhaps advertising income will start to shrink $12 for each user that subs to Premium?
No, they're just going to move the goalpost. Once everyone is on board with subbing to YT, and they have enough revenue. They'll reintroduce ads because that's just leaving money on the table.
> If you weren’t a paying customer, refuse to become a paying customer, and refuse to watch the ads, they don’t gain anything by having you as a user. It only costs them to retain you.
It helps yt achieve their mission /s
Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world.
We believe that everyone deserves to have a voice, and that the world is a better place when we listen, share and build community through our stories.
My $25/mo for life youtubetv subscription is now up to $80/mo. I'm regretting that now, but also kind of stuck because I have family members on the account.
I'm definitely not signing up for youtube premium.
Mate, Youtube have existed for almost 2 decades and you probably used them for most of it. I have used it to watch countless hours of lectures, talks, interviews and entertainment. You probably have the same experience of it for the past 2 decade too.
If you are not going to pay for THAT, you aren't going to pay for ANYTHING. Just admit you want free stuff. Stop deluding yourself into thinking that Youtube is somehow responsible for hosting all these for free.
Google set the standard for free online videos. It's what they used to aggressively drive other competitors out of the market. Now they want to reap the "benefits" of market dominance.
Yeah, I had this discussion with someone recently. Companies of that size can drown out competition for years, decades even, by operating at a loss (or just not making much profit at all) because they have numerous revenue streams and the pre-existing highly-profitable sources can subsidize the not-so-profitable new one. Once you have a nice big customer base, tighten the screws and wring money out of the users now that they are captive. The rate at which that process occurs varies, but it's basically inevitable, especially for publicly-traded corps.
Noone uses youtube because "it's better"(in what way even?). Everyone uses youtube because it's pretty much the only place for pre-filmed video content these days. If all content creators I watch moved to other sites, I would watch them there. I don't 'watch youtube', I watch people/channels that I follow. They've built a monopoly and now they're abusing it. I would gladly pay some low yearly subscription for Youtube without ads, but their current price is borderline insane, especially since most people won't use most of the features offered, all we want is an ad-free experience, I couldn't care less for Youtube Music. Until then, I will continue watching it via 3rd party sideloaded apps on my TV and with uBlock in web browser. Stop white-knighting corporations worth billions of dollars, they don't care for you as much as you care for them.
> Feels like I've been poised to give them money for a while
Pay for it or don't, but what is this nonsense about being poised (for a while) to maybe someday possibly consider thinking about purchasing the service?
It's $13. (In inflation-adjusted terms that's $7.12 the year I graduated high school.) What in the world are we talking about here? Buy it or don't. What is there to think about?
I just checked it's $15.99, which is a no go for me at the moment. If they offered a lower cost tier without YouTube music I would do it. However I use pandora (plus), I have for over a decade and have all my stations setup how I want them so I have no need for YouTube music. I mostly use the app anyways on my phone or tablet, so I still get ads. So it's not a big deal, but I do feel that $15.99 is to much at least for me at the moment, considering I pay for pandora and a few other streaming services.
Edit: Just realized I was viewing through the app with the Apple tax markup. However $13 is still more then ideal when I'll never use YouTube Music
My big problem with paying for Youtube is I have a workspace account for my personal domain. None of their services inter-operate with workspace services. For example, our Google Home. My wife cannot register her voice with the system because she has a 'google account' not an account on my workspace. Because of this, our Home will regularly deny her the ability to listen to "age restricted" podcasts about cooking (they sometimes swear omg). Similarly, if I pay for Youtube, I cannot "share with my family" unless they are also on my workspace.
Clearly, the solution is for me to create another google account to use for these services and only use my workspace account for one thing. But then why am I paying Google to host my workspace account? Should I pay them _MORE_ for my wife and children to also be on my workspace, as well as paying for Youtube? (don't worry, I'm working on migrating off workspaces too).
(and fwiw, I paid for youtube premium for years, and watch hours of youtube content a day)
Gsuite for personal use is and has always been very very half baked. To answer your question. I pay for it too but I also ask myself the same question as to why I don't just move my domain to a simpler service that'll host an email.
But yes, the solution is definitely having a separate private gmail for those services.
I moved to Outlook with a Microsoft 365 subscription after I found out you could have a custom domain tied to your email (via GoDaddy only, but you can still do it with the right DNS entries) and then made my Google account a free Gmail account.
I got way too sick of getting features months, or even years later, than consumer Google accounts. I wish they would offer a paid tier for Google/Gmail accounts that would allow one custom domain for email.
Their spam filtering is trash. Every day I get 1-2 obvious scam/spam emails. On the worst days I get 5+. I’ve been a customer for a year and I mark the spam as such with discipline and it has never caught on to what is spam. I’m at my limit and seriously considering going back to Workspace.
That's wild, and a bit disappointing to hear. My spam protection has been top-notch. Perhaps because it's a custom domain with very little traffic. Also I mask everything with 1Password which has been nothing but good too.
As a bonus, it is super fast because it doesn't have to justify the salaries of dozens (hundreds?) of frontend developers and can get away with server-side-rendered HTML and minimal amounts of Javascript.
Your bonus is my primary reason for using the service. Invidious, old.reddit.com, Gmail HTML Mode, are perfect examples of the great user experiences we've lost in the pursuit for New Shiny. Directly comparable with their "modern" counterparts. It would be nice if websites started to offer a cut-down version as an option, especially for users in 3rd world countries.
You can set to use old.reddit.com in account preferences, and I haven't seen new redesign since I reinstalled windows. That being said, the day the redesign gets pushed off, thats the day I stop using reddit.
If you don't care about logging into Reddit, you can try Libreddit or Teddit as read-only frontends. Bonus is you can use them without JS if that's a concern to you. Libreddit especially works better on mobile IMO
Of course these will probably only work until reddit changes their API, as they announced recently
Another alternative is Piped. https://piped.kavin.rocks. Comes with sponsorblock in addition to not showing ads. For Android users, use Youtube ReVanced if you want algorithm recommendations, NewPipe if not.
Piped works great! However it is let down by the (IMO) poor UX design. I would love for some graphics designer to step-in a create more usable CSS stylesheets for it.
Noone seeing the obvious connection to Manifest v3?
"Oh, it appears with the new Chrome extension API it is impossible to write an adblocker that bypasses this. How could that have happened? Google told us they only have our best interests in mind, so this must've been by accident."
Maybe people wouldn't be locking your ads if you didn't have them jacked up to saturation level. I sometimes watch on a console and the number of ads is ridiculous, even worse than broadcast TV. Sometimes you get ads in the middle of songs.
Let's be real --- ad blockers don't have a setting to let through one ad every 30 minutes.
I agree the number of ads is absolutely shocking, which I'm reminded every time I see someone else play youtube, as I've had a subscription for about as many years as it's been available. My time is absolutely worth more than whatever I'm paying to skip these ads.
From what I’ve seen YouTube actually has fewer ads than broadcast TV and the ads are mostly shorter. It just seems like they have more because of the timing.
Broadcast TV generally syncs the ads with act breaks in the show. YouTube generally doesn’t seem to do any syncing with the content, so ads can suddenly happen in the middle of someone speaking. That’s way more disruptive.
YouTube generally doesn’t seem to do any syncing with the content
No, this is wrong. They can detect pauses and typically slot ads between songs or during applause moments. I don't watch a lot of TV but most days share some family time where we catch news, weather, and some chat show fluff, so I regularly watch some short programs that I tolerate rather than like. If I'm bored by the comedian, I amuse myself by predicting when the ad will come in. I don't think YT even needs o analyze the content as such, they can go by the user behavior: on some clients, when you seek in the video it shows you a graph of most/least favored time offsets based on aggregated play times, so they can easily time ad breaks to fit where people stop watching or skip ahead, and they line up neatly with segment changes. This kind of advertising is a bit intrusive but merely annoying. But when listening to music and being served inappropriate/poorly timed ad selections, it's truly infuriating.
It's incredible how many people go "I was almost ready to give them money" whilst using Youtube all the time with an ad blocker. I know it, I was one of them for years.
Just buy the subscription. You get the free trial for a month. Nothing changes, the money is not missed, but you actually pay for something you use a lot.
The biggest benefit is not being subjected to ads anymore just by being next to family members who don't use ad blockers. It comes with four slots for family members.
IIRC YouTube Premium also comes with YouTube Music, which coming from a former Google Music user, the plan was a no-brainer.
If YT Music great? Well, no but it's fine. It has my music, podcasts and decent recommendation algorithm. Paired that with commerical free YT and it's a stellar offer.
It was definitely nowhere ready when the transition happened, but they've been constantly working on it for the past few years, unlike GPM which was mostly stuck for years. While it still has a few issues, there's a ton of cool features GPM never had either.
Are they actually making money off youtube? I almost doubt it. In any case I feel it might help to work against the shittification of the internet. Or maybe it doesn't, but at least it feels right.
They already make a profit from the service. I'm asking why I should provide them more than what they're already making. I believe their profit already gives them as much as they deserve for the service they render to society.
I do care about that! But YouTube, the one profiting from those creators, should be the one paying creators more, from their already very high profits. Not me.
I might watch one or two a month, that's it. I will always prefer written content over video. The only time I go for video is when I can't find a written source.
Haha, yeah if not using it I wouldn't get the subscription either. After subscribing they actually provide a little page of "Premium benefits enjoyed so far" listing the amount of hours spent watching.
For me it says > 120 hours and I have had the subscription for 4 months. So definitely making use of it.
YouTube is by no means the primary reason I run my ad blocker. That it works on YouTube is a side bonus, mostly useful if I need to watch something in an incognito window or while I'm signed into my work account. I pay for Premium on my main account mostly to support the creators. (The good ones tend to do the Patreon thing, and I much prefer to chip in there given the choice, but not everyone on YT does that.)
i’m an edge case: my computers are amnesiac: if i wanted to watch YT Premium, i’d have to log in again every morning. i have an old Google account, but it was setup with 2FA (TOTP) and Google’s made that login method as burdensome as they can to push users to prefer their apps. even if it were easy to login, i prefer to be logged out so that i don’t get sucked into those godawful YT comment arguments.
i watch a couple 5-minute YT videos each day: sure, i’d happily pay 10x whatever they make from me in ads, but there’s no way they could implement that in a way which doesn’t worsen my experience overall. not to mention the whole angle of providing Google with my undeniable legal name.
We first get adverts. And gee-golly-whillikers, they're also malware vendors and other terribvle horrible nogood crap you just don't want. And exploits. So yeah, you block ads with Ublock Origin.
Some shit site gets the idea to "block adblock". Detects a few common ones. But disabling javascript almost always works. But annoying.
By the time the chumps make "anti-anti-block adblock", we'll neuter that as well.
The endgame is something terrible like a WebAssembly that does forced downloads to get the content you want all in a VM like thing. That's what Widevine is already doing, kind of. Im just surprised that more for-profit news/media companies aren't doing exactly that, since now you have to pop off the payload in a container and try to detect what an ad is and isnt.
As an aside: If you're running Firefox, download Sponsorblock. It skips over the shit in-video adverts on Youtube with "a message from our sponsor". Oh, and you dont get this even IF you pay youtube.
What's next, "YouTube tests pausing videos when you look away from ads"?
This is a slippery slope that I definitely do not want to be going down. At that rate, "drink verification can" is not far off.
When I used to watch the actual TV I changed the channel, muted, or left the room during ads. My eyes, my ears, my brain. I will not be forced to consume.
Hmm good point. But I no longer watch live TV anyway. I'm done with that, I don't even have a connection to it anymore. And if streaming services start doing that I'll just download everything.
Yes. What I've done with my ring cameras was open them up and remove the microphones altogether (or in one case cut the cable to them).
They were able to hear my speak literally in the next room even covered in tape :P I don't mind video of my front door ending up in Amazon's cloud but I don't want my audio going there 24/7.
The difference is that having a computer attached to the TV provides significant value to the customer. When people came into BestBuy they’d ask “Does this TV have Netflix?”
I don’t see a built in camera driving that kind of consumer behavior. What feature would they come in and ask for that requires a camera?
The spying with a SmartTV is also hidden and and hard to imagine. A camera on the TV in their bedroom though? They’ll both notice that and understand that it sees them naked.
With Smart TVs if there are two TVs on a shelf, one with “Netflix installed” and one without, I can see people preferring the TV with Netflix.
With cameras if there are two TVs on a shelf, one with a camera and one without, I see people leaving the camera on the shelf almost every time.
You bring up an excellent point. There is no value add for the consumer. Problem is, that having a built in camera will be too great of a value add for the manufacturers selling your eyeballs.
Thank you for this information. I just find it amusing that instead of calling it "Big Brother telescreen" just calling it "Smart TV" made everyone comfortable with the technology : we are all smart, right?
As they say: just because you are paranoid, it does not mean that they are not after you.
If you take the slippery slope fallacy too far, you'd never be able to notice trends at all.
Google is like climate change - they keep pushing for more money, and ruining the experience for their users. There's no reason to expect this to stop. It's not a slippery slope.
My current Twitch ad blocking solution merely mutes the stream while the ad plays, that's good enough for me. In the end we might have to settle for only muting and hiding the ads in a way that the source cannot detect, but it's better than the alternative.
Yeah, and YT Music is included too right? Because I have YT Music and no ads and it's really cheap compared to other services. I pay COP$17900 which is little less than USD$4. I used to pay around USD$10 for Spotify.
The main reason they get paid is that their income is primarily from sponsorships and affiliate links now. Youtube premium doesn't block that, and it's a much more insidious kind of ad.
It makes you think you're watching somebody being authentic, when really it's a business disguising itself as an authentic person that's trying to sell you things (whether out of bias or strategy)
How about a smart TV, a streaming stick/box (e.g. Roku, Amazon Fire Stick), or a games console?
Pi-hole will work for some types of ad on all devices, but I'm not sure how it'd work for video ads in an app like YouTube - particularly if Google started serving the ads from the same servers as the content.
YT Premium only makes the problem worse by requiring you to log in using an account that is tied to your real world identity and was used for payment processing. You just end up giving more data points to Google to track you, cross-reference with other sources and shove more ads in other platforms, still get native ads, and Google can just add their own ads later (as it is happening step by step with streaming companies).
The flip side s that you don't have to use Chrome+Google for everything. I buy ebooks and watch youtube on it, plus my phone (so I buy android apps via the same google account). And Gmail is my fallback email account so that doesn't see much traffic.
I use 3-4 browsers and because WFH + VM's for coding some incidental sandboxing.
Well, my hubby’s iPad and our iPhones don’t support ad blocking on YouTube, nor does my Smart TV, so…ad blocking only works on 1/5 of my husband’s devices and my own would actually be effective with ad blocking, for one…
(And before you say ‘just switch to Android’, I’m an iOS/WatchOS dev and a music producer for a living - if anything with the recent announcement of Logic on the iPad, I’ll be buying another iPads not reducing them…)
Actually better, because I share it with my family and no one has to deal with installing / configuring adblockers on different platforms (mobile app, TV, laptops whatever) It also includes Music so together I think it is a pretty good deal. Prices in some countries are ridiculously cheap as well (<$2 monthly in India, Turkey) , but of course that could change in time.
My only problem is the sponsored content in youtube videos, I would give some extra money to skip that crap as well.
I had YouTube Family at $15/month until this month, when they raised the price to $23. I signed up back when Google Play Music was still a thing.
I was never able to get into YouTube Music, though, so I don't actually use it to stream my music. The fact that my playlists are shared between YouTube and YouTube Music is enough for me to drop it from serious consideration as a music streaming service on its own. That, plus the lack of lossless streaming, inconsistent, clunky UI, and lack of any positive features that distinguish it from Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music, is why I never used it for anything other than sharing songs with people who didn't use Tidal.
That they apparently also include ads in the albums I transferred from Google Play Music - albums that I paid for - is just added insult.
The main way I justified paying the subscription was that other people in my household got access to ad-free music streaming (and they actually used it, unlike me), Youtubers get comped more from me watching their videos, and I didn't have to worry about whole-home adblockers to remove ads from the app. But after a 50% price hike that takes it above the prices for Tidal Family ($15), Apple Music Family ($17), and Spotify Family ($16), it's not something I can justify anymore.
(Youtube Music Family is $15, FWIW, but it doesn't include Youtube itself.)
> That, plus the lack of lossless streaming, inconsistent, clunky UI, and lack of any positive features that distinguish it from Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music, is why I never used it for anything other than sharing songs with people who didn't use Tidal.
The UX and performance of the YouTube Music web client is so much worse than the old Google Music web client. I used to be able to scroll my entire album collection without a hiccup on Google Music, that's now impossible with YouTube Music
I don't like paying a platform that rose to prominence because of piracy, just so that I can watch IP created by other people without youtube inserting a really intense number of ads into the experience. And all the vidoes are ads anyway, it's just via sponsorships and affiliate links now.
> I don't like paying a platform that rose to prominence because of piracy
Is that true? Yeah it's there, more so in the past, but I have to imagine that was a tiny amount of their viewership. I'd imagine most viewing is from individual channels of real people.
Something that doesn't get Google to ban accounts? Blocking a payment to Google or doing a charge-back is involved in nearly all account closure complaints on this site.
Btw: as someone who's worked in banks, I'd like to point out that there are circumstances where some banks will charge-back automatically (or outright "accept the payment", then not pay), if they suspect fraud for example.
In Europe there are a few options which let you pay with your bank account without a credit card. I tried to look up all the things Wise supports, found part of the list:
Except we paid for other streamers for an ad-free experience – until they started inserting ads again. Do we believe that Google of all companies won't pull a switcheroo in a few years?
By this kind of hypothetical assumption, you shouldn't pay for anything, as the other party might change the terms in future, or in your parlance, "pull a switcheroo"
i don't even hate ads or the idea of targeted advertising in theory but 20+ years into the panopticon and the company that has the most information about my purchasing habits, interests and dislikes still has never shown me any advertising that was even remotely relevant to my life. i still have better odds of seeing something i actually want to buy just by flipping through the paper and those adverts don't demand that i put my life on pause just because corporation x spent a whole lot of money on a branding campaign that is annoying, unfunny and makes me hate them and their products.
This somewhat alludes to a question I have wondered for quite a while. Are there any compelling data that digital advertising even works?
Sure, if one clicks on an ad then immediately buys a product, then perhaps that would be more straightforward. However, I just do not think that is very common, but I could be wrong.
It just seems like there is some kind of false notion that if a company creates ads and the company has an increase in sales, then it must be because of the ads, when in reality, it could be entirely coincidental.
Tangental, but I intentionally boycott products that have annoying ads. I will walk to the ends of the Earth before I use GEICO, for example.
Isn't Linus Tech Tips an ad, though? The only times I've looked at it all I've seen is sponsored content with breaks to talk about sponsors and maybe buy some merch. Oh, and exhortations to use their affiliate links. And that's using Premium, I expect that without it the sponsored content would be broken up by youtube's ads.
Maybe my expectations are biased by subscribing to Nebula? And for those who do, Medlife Crisis just posted a fun video on the placebo effect featuring great (fake) sponsor callouts.
Keep in mind that HN/Reddit is comprised of thousands or millions of people and there may or may not be overlap between those saying the first thing and later the second.
The rule of thumb according to youtubers is that 1000 video views is worth about $1 of ad share. Youtube's ad share is about 50%, so 1000 video views should be worth about $2 of ad money for Youtube. Youtube Premium costs $12 a month which is equivalent to 6000 video views per month or ~200 video views per day. If I'm on a very youtuby mood I'll maybe watch 10 videos in a day. So, best case scenario, paying for premium comes with a 20x markup.
So your conversation actually goes:
HN/Reddit: "I would love to just give you the money directly instead of watching ads in exchange for advertizers giving you money."
Companies: "Sure, here's the ad-free version. You have to pay 20 times as much as the advertizers do though."
The people willing to pay are the ones advertisers want to reach. Obviously we don't know the breakdown, but it's reasonable to think that advertisers would be willing to spend 20x less per ad if the high value users never saw them.
What, so Google can track me better? I hate YouTube's recommendation system and only watch videos in a Private browsing window. I would happily pay for YouTube if they wouldn't track me, shovel shit in my face, or otherwise misuse my data.
There's a really simple reason for this - HN/Reddit is not one person. It consists of multiple people with different opinions, and as such, there is no singular opinion to be found.
I use YouTube infrequently and I still find it worth it. I don't at all mind paying to get rid of ads. But if there is no option to pay, and you try to force ads, I'll choose not using your service instead. An ad-based service is not something I'm interested in.
It seems inferior to a combination of ublock origin and sponsorblock. Unlike using these two, you don't have the option of staying logged out while watching videos without being bombarded by ads.
I'm pretty torn here. I don't believe I deserve access to free content, and there's _nothing_ wrong with any site blocking access if you don't want to see ads.
I've done a lot of digital curtailing in my life, but Youtube has been hard to avoid. It's both good and bad, as they have some of the most amazing content in the whole world, but also some of the most addictive trash that I can't stop watching. Because the service is so addicting, I'm not sure I could justify paying for it, even though the value it brings is incredible.
Generating money by forcing ads to be shown on someone else's device, using the power and internet connection that they pay for, is also stealing if you really think about it.
In my country a publisher is liable for anything they say unless they have a license, and the license require that they abide to local laws. Youtube do not do this since they think they do not need to follow those laws, nor do they take responsibility for anything they publish (including advertisement). They don't even pay value gain taxes when selling this content in return for the service of me watching the ad.
I will respect their expectations when they respect mine.
That sounds pretty bleak, honestly. While you can disagree with Youtube and its policies, the idea of open free speech should appear, at first blush, more important than strict protections against libel or hate speech.
The kind of speech that is limited would be things like publishing malware, or doing illegal advertisement. No advertisement to kids, no alcohol, no tobacco, no prescription medicine, no guns, and no fraudulent messages.
Taxes is also pretty much defined by the expectation of compensation. If a speaker talks on a conferences and get paid to do so, they will need to pay taxes. They have as much open free speech they can get, but they are not free to demand compensation for it without paying taxes.
-google ads before the video
-google ads after the video
-google ads DURING the video, if it's too long.
-At least one "this video sponsored by our sponsor, sponsor sponsor".
There's a limit to how many ads I'm willing to sit through to watch someone tell me why Harbor Freight tools are [The Greatest Thing Ever || Worthless Garbage]
No, if you really think about it, that’s not remotely true here. A creator — myself included — is paid by Google for their content, which Google uses to attract the eyeballs that the advertisers are paying them to serve ads to… the creator doesn’t actually have any interest (financial or otherwise) in whether or not those ads are actually being watched (as opposed to being served). Since virtually all creators rely on non-Google-served advertising income streams (PayPal, merch, sponsorships, etc) for their real income, and invasive ads merely impede that, anything that Google does to drive people to ad blockers really just hurts creators. No stealing is occurring.
I produce media and I sell it to Google. Google in turn produces an interested audience for that media and sells their views to advertisers in the form of ads served. Advertising agencies in turn produce ads to sell to (for example) GM… GM is the ONLY party with a material interest in the ad actually being viewed by the (potential) consumer, as they’re the only party who can convert my media into a GM vehicle being sold. If anyone in that chain can consider an ad blocker theft, it’s GM… that’d still be wrong, of course, for the same reason ignoring a billboard on the freeway isn’t theft.
When you lay a trap and your prey refuses to be caught they aren’t harming you.
Many of the creators I listen to sell their content, and when they do, I pay for it if I can. (some do not sell their content on a service which allows for non-DRM audio purchases.)
I mean the reality is that YT has high quality content for almost any subject matter you can think of. That’s the beauty of the platform, you can find your niche. Hell, it’s even good for most things that pop into your head, podcast clips, old commercials, instruction manuals, DIY etc etc.
I listen to a LOT of amateur music on Youtube. This probably won't be most people's fancy, but I consider this to be the best performance of this particular song which exists.
There's a lot on Youtube like this. Music which is either just a cover, or is original that you literally can't find anywhere else because some hobbyist threw it up there and then stopped performing years ago.
There are also plenty of amazing lectures. I'm about halfway through this Yale course, but need to get back to watching it.
On a related note, I hate how A/B testing has become an excuse to aggravate a subsegment of your customer base to 'quantify' a feature or service.
Getting an adblocker denied message on youtube to determine exactly how much YT can annoy you in the service of stuffing more ads into your videos is both actively user-hostile and very definitely evil.
In most medical research, there are all types of consents that are required before you get subjected to this.
They are going to start an arms race. This will likely lead to much further advances in ad-blocking that would be a bad outcome for them. This is a balancing act for sure. I guess they must see lots of people blocking ads to think it's worth while going for it. This could even be a smaller team looking at bumping up their metrics or hit perf goals without seeing the larger impact across the company.
And doing anything with Chrome to undermine people will not only harm them in this ad-blocking race, but also cause them to lose massive market share in the browsers... They won't do that. They're not that dumb.
Chrome has no effective competition in the browser market, so Google has no need to worry about market share.
Firefox's user base has shrunk to the point where it's barely relevant. (And I say this as a user myself.) Beyond that, Mozilla currently needs to follow Google's lead just to stay alive. They rely on Google financially, and need to keep up with Chrome's features to maintain what market share they have left.
Brave and the like could be easily killed off by taking Chrome closed-source. Microsoft would probably strike a deal to keep Edge alive. I doubt Safari supports extensions, and Apple wouldn't have any qualms about pulling a few to keep the peace with Google.
Getting us out of this will be difficult. Barring Google returning to their old slogan, the only option I can see is a move to a new set of standards. Hopefully things will move back towards decentralization as peoples' technical literacy increases.
Everyone still remembers Firefox fondly. The wrong move from Google and everyone (who will take a step to manually download a browser) will return to it.
Sure, but I still won't be paying. There's nothing so important in YouTube that I'd ever even consider paying, I'd drop it like a hot turd if I couldn't block ads.
To be fair, YT Premium is one of the few subscriptions I think is a no-brainer and good value for money.
Sometimes when I've forgotten to log in and see what it's like without, it's amazing anyone can watch videos on there. Like a lot of people I've generally been OK to watch ads in exchange for free content but it seems over the years instead of ads getting better and/or more relevant to my interests (even broadly), they're getting much worse.
I assume this is the result of companies just accepting ££ for anything rather than having more quality control?
As the old saying goes, good ideas shouldn't require force. If they have a "no-brainer" offering, no need to strong-arm people into using it, right?
I get it that they are not a charity and can monetize or paywall their platforms as seen fit, but there's something just sad about the model where you build a customer-friendly and open platform, then progressively crapify it once you capture a niche and eliminate most alternatives, and then start penalizing users for trying to work around that.
By this logic, buying e-books from Amazon is the worst value I can think of, because I can get them effortlessly from libgen and other "sources", and a single book can cost as much as the whole year of YouTube premium.
Except ad-blocker is literally just stealing bandwidth. Just because it's legal (under the current law), it doesn't mean it's morally right. Why should Youtube or any hosting service serves a user when they refuses to view the ads? YouTube is not a public service.
It is morally right, not because it is legal, but because I was never asked to make a market transaction for the content. By your reasoning, it would be theft to close your eyes during a TV commercial. I completely reject your line of reasoning.
Yes, this is why YouTube should just refuse to serve you and other adblocker users. This way it can no longer steal your time, and it's the only fair solution.
If you truly believe this (which I don't agree with), at least you're consistent. But I feel "adblock good, piracy bad" is a double standard that many people hold.
Practically, I think adblocker is even slightly worse than piracy. At least when you download a cracked game via a torrent, you don't cost Steam any money.
In Google/YouTube's defense, this mentality is why we can't have nice things. You think it's cheap to host the content YouTube does? Paying for premium to remove ads is a way of saying "Thank you for providing me this service, instead of displaying me irrelevant ads, just take my money"
It's also worth noting that creators get paid more for YT Premium views than ad-based views. YouTube, for all its problems, has far better revenue-sharing than pretty much any other "user generate content" platform.
>You think it's cheap to host the content YouTube does?
These discussions always include bad-faith arguments about offsetting costs.
The purpose of ads on websites like YouTube is not just to offset costs, it is to maximize profits. The distinction is important; it means Google doesn't stop showing you ads once they've paid their bills, so please stop framing it this way. They will show you as many ads as they can before it starts to hurt their bottom line. They are not serving videos to be nice.
This is what we want, though, right? The alternatives would be a paywall, or charge per view. (Or, I guess, pay to "own", like a Kindle ebook, but seems like a mismatch for most of their content.)
I would have bought premium years ago if the free version lets you play in background when on mobile. This attitude of going out of your way to cripple EXTREMELY basic feature to get me to pay premium didn't sit well with me.
Asking me to pay for the ability to have background play to me is akin to opening a restaurant and serving unsalted food and asking 2% extra for salt in the food.
I already pay for a few other google services (google one, google cloud etc) and their customer service (that I have needed on the rare occasion) is ..... almost non existent as well.
Will most probably use alternate frontends or a pihole or whatever other alternative there is for as long as I can.
Man, the amount of misunderstanding present in the comments here is astonishing.
1. YT doesn't decide how many ads to show. The creator of the video gets to choose exactly how many ads are shown and when and where they are shown.
If you see too many ads on your videos, get pissed off at the creators you're watching, not YT.
2. Ad revenue is a very large portion of income for most creators. It's definitely not as large as sponsorship deals, but it's nothing to sneeze at. You people who are entitled to your free content aren't sticking it to the man by refusing to watch ads. Instead you're directly hurting the creators you enjoy watching by specifically depriving them of any ad revenue they may otherwise have gained from you. Shut up and sit down and watch the 30 second ad or stop watching YT altogether. The creators don't give a crap either way because you clearly don't give a crap about financially supporting them in the simplest way possible.
3. If anything, I believe YT will stop showing ads if they're too prevalent. There's a feature where creators can play ads at the beginning/ending of their videos. These ads don't play all the time, and I think that's because the YT algorithm is making sure that if you're doing something like playing music it doesn't play an ad at the beginning of every single song even if the video creator tries to make that happen.
Honestly, these comments read as if cable didn't exist just a few years ago (and still does today!) where they literally play 2 minutes of ads for every 5ish minutes of content. Even with DVR, skipping through the ads would take around 30 seconds (and then you have to adjust to make sure you didn't skip too far and everything) which is the length of typical YT ads. Buck up and pay up to support the "amazing" content that you selfishly indulge in and refuse to pay for out of a warped sense of entitlement.
Contrary to popular belief, most content creators are not putting their content out for free. They're putting it out knowing the majority of viewers will at least watch the ads and help them make money.
I use YouTube with an ad blocker and I am not a Premium subscriber anymore and won't pay out of principle after the dislike button removal, which has made using YouTube for tutorials and how-to videos useless for me. Instead, I support creators whose content I enjoy off-YouTube.
I am not worried about Google going forth with this. I see others asking what happens when users won't pay for a subscription and at the same time won't view ads? I believe the answer is pretty clear.
YouTube will either decide to suck up that they won't see ad revenue from a portion of the audience (ad blockers are and will always be a niche thing, there is no reality in which YouTube buckles because too many people block ads, especially since YouTube is predominantly viewed on devices where ad blocking is not as easy as in the desktop browser) or they will close up shop.
The fact is that YouTube currently occupies a spot in the online sphere which will always be occupied by someone: being the top service for hosting videos for free and showing them to audiences for free. There is a line of businesses which would jump on the opportunity of filling YouTube's "woeful" position of being the top dog in online video.
YouTube's collapse would be devastating considering the amount of culture and history stored on there. But new video content will always find a home and reach online. And Google knows this which is why they will IMO never give up on YouTube even if it were operating with loss again. Storage is only getting cheaper and their moat with YouTube is the user-generated content. Gate it too heavily and creators will find a place where they can post content more freely and users will fine a place where they can view content more freely.
I don't expect this to be anything other than YouTube pulling a Netflix with their password sharing crackdown complete with the back-paddling that ensued once they realized how replaceable they really are to a sizeable portion of their viewers loosing which would be more expensive than keeping it.
YouTube is extremely expensive to host and that too when it relies on Google infra which is very well optimised. Please remind me of any non trivial Government software project that didn't cost ridiculous amounts of money compared to similar private products.
Cost is certainly a consideration, but not the only consideration that matters (not to me, at any rate).
The issue of private- vs public-run projects is complicated by culture. There's a vicious cycle / virtuous circle that happens in a given society. In a place where government projects have a bad reputation (of being wasteful and substandard), it makes it difficult for government projects to succeed.
That's a long way of replying to you that you're probably correct about cost-overruns in most nations - but I don't believe it has to be that way. You can probably predict the nations I'd trot out that do a better job.
At any rate, where Youtube is concerned, I'd sooner government be in charge, regardless of cost. I don't see Youtube ever making the public good its primary focus - not if its front page, recommendations, or comments section are any indication.
Agreed. I just also think living in a knowledgeable society is important. Video could help. Youtube does a terrible job of that. Presumably it's not great economically if a nation is full of dummies.
I'm with you, man. I run an ad blocker and I sure would hate to pay Google another dime. But I have to say objectively, govt ownership ought to be reserved for services that either practically cannot make a profit or morally should not make a profit. Things like police, fire, medical, education, etc.. The entertainment sector though has been making a profit for hundreds of years. Radio was funded entirely by commercialism from the beginning, as was television, and thus far the Internet has followed. So I gotta disagree with you as much as it pains me to admit. There may be a way to get some things funded like purely educational, or the arts, but the vast majority of YouTube is really just pure entertainment and ought to remain profit driven.
Other than driving a mass exodus to Firefox, I don’t see this having any real impact. Unless you own the whole software stack adblock is a game of cat and mouse.
Let’s say worst case scenario google embeds ads into the video itself, and refuses to stream the actual video packets until the length of the ad has elapsed. The repetitive nature of advertising makes if trivial to detect when the served video is an ad and when it’s content. You might be able to make me wait for a video file, but you can’t make me watch an ad. My Firefox extension is gonna replace those advertising frames with a black loading screen and there’s nothing google can do to stop that.
They don't mind the cat and mouse games, as long as they capture some people. Whether this is through showing ads or getting them to subscribe.
I believe this has been successful for Twitch, growing revenue despite decrease in concurrent viewers. So the real impact seems obvious to me, even if I would personally avoid it.
I wish Peertube was more usable. The UX is generally subpar (although impressive for an ActivityPub-based system). There's also the problem that hosting servers to host video is _so damn expensive_. There is literally only one Peertube instance I ever watch videos on (https://tilvids.com/) and I'm honestly considering stopping using it altogether. I'm not sure what I want out of Framasoft really, but I don't think Peertube or any similar solution becomes viable soon without socializing costs for video hosting, encoding, etc.
Peertube of course has the peer system, but I don't think my client has ever uploaded more than 100kb from any peers, it's all from the server. There's also no way that I know of to "donate" some network/storage BitTorrent style to servers I wish to support, which again means the costs are all centralized and extremely high.
On top of the video player hover over the "x peers" on the bottom, it will tell you how much data you downloaded, uploaded, and how much of the download came from peers or the server.
You can configure your server to download and mirror videos from other instances, but (iirc) only if the remote instance allows it, and if it allows your instance to "follow" it.
The fact that you haven to follow other servers as a server is insane. It also really fucks up federation, because some instances do not allow follows at all. Tilvids does not, which was a major factor in me shutting down my instance.
That said, the mirroring system is really nice. You have all sorts of dials to cache only the x most popular videos for y days and up to z GB. You can have it mirror videos from user subscriptions in a similar way, and right next to the 'download video' button is one that says 'mirror' that does what you think.
P2P as a client is a whole different matter, and I also have never, ever seen my client uploading. I think this is purely a function of how few users are actually on peertube. The chances of you watching the same video as another person on the planet is incredibly small.
I really, really want to like peertube, but it really is completely unusable. Discovery is abysmal because there's no global search. You can't rely on federation to find content because federation is opt-in and has a crazy nonsense mechanism.
Peertube is not fit to run a single-user instance like mastodon unless you only want to publish. It simply doesn't work at all if you only wish to consume video. The only real way to use the service at all is to sign up on the biggest instance you can find and hope they have interesting videos.
I have a server with tons of free disk and a big fat fiber line, and the idea of mirroring peertube videos of small creators sounds like a perfect use for my spare resources. I would love to mirror tilvids to help reduce their server load, but I simply can't because they choose to disallow it.
The only alternative is LBRY/Odyssey, which is vastly more popular, but has some serious issues with violent/extreme/illegal content and is fully wrapped up in blockchain bullshit.
A major part apart from building a queue by getting behind is the ability of the file manager to sort, to classify, to filter, to move into folders, to search, etc. Far better than the youtube web interface, which only has the options of displaying your subscriptions as a grid or as a list. So I now have a local queue of videos which I can use, in which weird expeditions into obscure genres are into their own folders, must-match-now videos are tagged, etc, and I can pick and choose according to my own tastes of the moment.
That is one of my pet peeves in UI design in the last decade and it is not only web applications – shoebox apps are often as limited. If you want to do anything to your data or just have different sort orders or views, you only have what the app developer allows and often that is nothing.
Thanks to the web and shoebox apps I appreciate file managers like Finder even more now. It’s amazing what UI controls like NSTableView/NSOutlineView gives the user in functionality. Modern collection views often look better and I appreciate that, but I do miss the functionality which, while possible, often simply is not implemented.
Downloading is an option, though there are of course numerous others:
- You can stream directly. I do this via a bash function for cases where mpv itself doesn't play a video (for reasons I've been unable to / not had the spoons to track down):
- You can use ytdlp as a front-end to other tools, and in fact if you peek under the bonnet you'll find that many YouTube / video streaming tools are in fact using yt-dlp as their access mechanism.
- There are times when downloading a video is the only way to be assured that you'll have access to content in the future, or when offline. Note that when YouTube removes content it also removes all metadata associated with that content, including title, description, and the account which had posted it.
Mine likewise, but it still encounters errors frequently, particularly with YouTube, which my hack addresses. Even after updating to the most recently-available versions.
This is on Android / F-Droid / pip. I've hacked those specifically to keep yt-dlp and mpv as updated as possible.
You're looking for a media server. Plex, Jellyfin and Emby are the 3 popular choices, out of which Jellyfin is the only completely free open source software
I don’t block ads - I block YouTube trying to monetise things that are built into the internet and my phone - eg. Video that plays in the background when I close the website
It is just offensive that they want me to pay for something that is my phones feature not theirs.
Makes me really happy that I recently subscribed to Nebula. I had YouTube Premium for a while but the experience kept getting worse. They removed email notifications, added more and more ads for "premium features" that I wasn't interested in and kept making offline downloads a pain (YouTube DL is usually a better experience). On top of that the recommendations are awful and search results have random unrelated ads for "recommended videos" inline with the thing I was actually searching for. At some point I felt mistreated enough and stopped my subscription.
Nebula is great. It feels like they are actually just trying to allow me to watch videos, no nonsense. I have found a few bugs and the support team is nice and responsive. I can't imagine what else I would want.
I used Nebula for a while a year or two ago, but their Android app was almost unusably bad, so I cancelled my subscription. I'm curious if it's any better now.
I do use their app. About 50/50 Firefox and the Android app.
There is a pretty annoying bug regarding Chromecast (opening a link when already connected to a device doesn't work properly) that I reported but apparently they are working on it. But other than that I haven't had any issues.
There's a "lite" option for €7/month (instead of €12) which only removes ads, but doesn't include music and all the other stuff. Prices may differ per region; this is what it shows for me.
I hope this leads to a viable competitor to Youtube. Youtube being the de-facto video host for medium length content has pretty noticeable effects on how content is created to tailor to Youtube's algorithms and users.
I would love to see a BitTorrent-style solution to video hosting. If your video is popular, there's more seeders, but also you can just seed it yourself. Then you can have an ecosystem where there's different indexers with different recommendation algorithms but the content is the same.
I use ad blocker a lot. After seeing this title, for a sec I felt frustrated about YouTube but then I realized it is better for me and my family to subscribe YouTube premium… and I just did it.
Long story: We are Chinese family living in US. We listen to both Chinese and English songs. We have both Apple Music and Spotify memberships, but due to copyright, many Chinese songs are not available (sometime this is true for other languages or even English songs, that’s why we have both subscriptions). Since a few years ago, I just found that YouTube has all the songs we love, some are high quality live stage recordings that are even better to listen (kinda surprising since YouTube is blocked in China mainland). So nowadays my family are listening music on YouTube more frequently: we have our own playlists, use YouTube on iPhone Safari with AdGuard so no noisy ads. The problem is we have to keep safari open and can’t use other apps when listening to music. Also jumping in the playlist is painful especially when driving.
Now this HN title just reminds me of YouTube premium that has no ads, supports background playing, and better playlist control. Then I really don’t see a reason to keep Apple Music and Spotify subscriptions which together cost more but still lack of songs we love.
Disclaimer: I work for Google and this represents my personal opinion.
I pay for the premium. I have a 2nd gen Chromecast. For some time there is a modified interface and it is akin to Youtube TV. So you see thumbnails for the proposed videos there. They also advertised having a remote control for the interface from the Youtube app on the phone. They display often a huge banner to sign in for the best experience. But when you try it gives an unhelpful message: "Can't sign in. You can still watch YouTube as ... bla bla". It is intentional: https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1537338169108140033
If you select a video from this interface you will be served with ads. Sometimes with an additional banner to sign in and enjoy Premium.
I would gladly ignore this interface, but my daughter likes to select things out of it. I would just prefer to have it like it was before (just a static image until you play something) instead of this thing screaming at me.
That sometimes makes me want to cancel the Premium.
- They removed the "mix" things that keep coming back like a bad smell
- They let me remove youtube music
- Their suggestions were less terrible. Like seriously they run the biggest data centers in the world, have some of the best ML researchers and know what I actually watch. How do they manage to be so consistently bad at this?
- Their search was less terrible. They figured out search of the whole internet 20 years ago, how is search in YT worse than searching YT from duckduckgo?
I have been burned, yet again, by YouTube just deciding that my comments were spam and removing at least the last half dozen of them. At least they haven't shadowbanned them this time.
And of course I got no warnings whatsoever about this, and trying to contact Google about this issue is likely to be a waste of time.
This is an enormous abuse of moderation (and a violation of netiquette) that I have only ever seen on platforms.
I don’t understand. You would pay for YouTube premium if youtube had less features?
I don’t use shorts and for a long time I didn’t use YouTube music either (despite paying for premium). I now use it because it’s rather good.
And YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is crazy good, but you have to tune it. It’s a tool. You tune it by not watching shitty videos you don’t like; if you do, remove them from your history afterwards and hit thumbs down on them. Subscribe to channels you like and thumbs up videos you really like. All these things are strong signals and the recommendation algorithm will vastly improve if you do this.
I mean it when I say it’s the absolute most useful tool there is in terms of discovery on the web.
But yes their search sucks more ass than a donkey vacuum.
Yes it would be better if it didn't have those features in the same way that I would pay more for a Burrito if someone had not taken a shit in it.
I might be a weird edge case. I do all the things you say but the recommendations totally suck for me. I only watch videos I like. I watch a lot of videos. If I ever watch something I didn't like I remove it and thumbs down and yet all the recommendations are total garbage.
Edit to add: i get that shorts, mix and music are things some people like. I really don’t and I hate that mix I can’t remove at all and shorts I can remove for 30 days and then it comes back. It feels like google is doing this sort of dark pattern bs more and more.
That said: I have been convinced by people pointing out how much more valuable premium views are to people who make the stuff I watch so have subscribed. Makes me puke just a little bit to say that.
No, it sounds more like you are being served your burrito with a cocktail, even though you are trying to quit cold turkey.
On another note, I find it highly offending that somebody tries to shove something down my throat, even though I explicitly refused it. No, I do not want shorts on the home screen, or anywhere else. Let me own my screen real estate, after all, this is supposed to be a premium service?
I mean I don’t like shorts either and I don’t like how YouTube is “shoving” them as you say, but how are you under the impression that just because you pay fifteen bucks a month you get full control over how the homepage looks? Your logic applies to every single pixel on their website.
Shorts are a feature of YouTube. You don’t have to use it or look at it, and it only shows up on the homepage or when you’re looking at other shorts. It’s really not unreasonable.
If you want to pay and not get shorts but still get good content just subscribe to nebula, it’s also fantastic value, just as YouTube is.
One argument I heard at some point is that google is better of if people who don't click ads use ad-block.
If you care enough that you install ad-blockers you will not click on any ads anyway. If they block ad-block then their click-per-view metrics will go down which looks bad to advertisers and makes ad spots sell for less
Of course that is a very simple view of a very complex problem, but there is definitely some merit to it. For example ad-block these days has been normalised enough that too many people do it, even people that would click some ads. Also, specifically for youtube, by allowing ad-block you reduce the value of youtube premium (which is not true for google search for example, there is no google search premium)
Definitely Google is better off serving exactly the ads a user will click, including no ads for the user who will never ever click any ad, even one from their favorite sneaker brand. But I think a lot fewer people are actually in the never ever camp than they think. And even though I know I click ads on occasion, I still run an ad blocker.
It really surprises me that they DON'T do this for everyone yet. Is it a technical thing? Is it hard to detect blockers for them? Are they afraid of losing views? Genuinely curious what's holding them back at this point.
1. Youtube is profitable, so there is no pressure to do it immediately.
2. It may hurt video creators more than it helps. Many youtubers are sponsored, so they would prefer a view with adblock over no viewer. This keeps them on the platform.
3. Similarly, it keeps viewers on the platform, and maybe more importantly, away from other platforms.
Given that they have the largest analytics platform, they should be able to fairly easily see that sites that employ adblocker blockers suffer very high bounce rates for visits coming from search.
Personally, I would absolutely stop going to youtube if they tried to block me from visiting while my adblocker is active.
Funny story, my wife wanted to watch a show on Amazon Freevee, and for the first time in years we were treated to what people watching cable TV without a DVR have to go through.
Odds are, we won't watch anything else there.
I don't mind supporting content creators and distributors, but the volume and repetitive nature of watching the same ads over and over again exceeds the value I get from the content.
As for YouTube, I already have enough subscriptions, so I might just end up not using it anymore. The volume of new content for the niches I look for tends to be very low.
A/B testing. They're doing this for everything, a few months ago they blocked videos to 3rd party apps (Newpipe, Revanced, ...) only for certain accounts in certain countries
I actually subscribe to YT Premium. More than happy to for an ad-free experience.
But that's tied to my personal account. Sometimes I want to watch a video on my work laptop, or just in incognito mode. I would find it incredibly irritating if that were blocked because I use an adblocker. In this case I've paid for no ads, I just don't want this particular video linked to my personal account.
This has the potential to help me quit Youtube altogether. The amount of time I waste on there is embarrassing. But I will never disable my ad blocker, and I won't pay money to mindlessly waste time scrolling through videos.
This will save them whatever it costs to serve me videos, and I will spend my life more productively. Win - Win.
Because they are embedded in the stream itself something I am not sure would be viable for youtube to do at their scale. For twitch, you basically have to use a proxy hosted in another country where they dont show ads to retrieve the stream links.
They're not embedded in the UK at least, you can confirm this by watching something via the Twitch plugin for Kodi which is sent video of a countdown timer instead.
Same with uMatrix. However I do get YouTube ads... Twitch ads sound like they would be horribly frustrating because of the real time nature of the experience !
It's rare to see Twitch ads because they don't have very much ad inventory. But if you happen to be a rare match for one of the few ads they have, you'll see that same ad over and over and over again.
I work in ad-tech. The tech to make ads unblockable has existed for years now (server side ad insertion makes ads indistinguishable from content because they're delivered through the same gateway in the same video stream thus bypassing DNS/network and DOM based ad blocking).
However, it's still rarely used because sufficiently capable users with advanced adblockers do not make up enough lost revenue over the increased infrastructure cost.
It's been fascinating watching Google lag in this area given the amount of engineering resources, market share, and platform control they have. We in the industry theorized that they'd use their dominant market position with Chrome and Android to protect their ad business, which is why they didn't invest much in unblockable or required ads. But it appears it's not for lack of want, it seems like it's just poor execution and unexpected diminishing market share.
> We in the industry theorized that they'd use their dominant market position with Chrome and Android to protect their ad business, which is why they didn't invest much in unblockable or required ads.
I think YouTube Premium LITE is definitely worth the 7 € I pay for it, and I wish YouTube would actually tell users about it.
If I had known there was a LITE option I would have subbed probably years ago - but it seems like they do their damndest best to try not to tell you about it.
Twitch does the same. They have some kind of site-wite subscription ("twitch turbo"). Although I think it is a tad expensive for what it is. And they do their damndest best for you not to know about it.
I just Googled it... looks like it was released in 2021 for select countries. Still not available in UK. £7 seems like a reasonable amount and I would 100% pay that. £12 is just too much.
Ads are a cancer on modern society. People act like they're OK, but I feel like these ads are constantly using up brain space that could be used for something else. Constantly being surrounded with messages telling you what you need, what you want, who or what you should be, how inferior your life is if you don't have X product. Ugh.
They will pry my ad-block from my cold, dead hands. I will sooner stop using YT altogether than give in on this.
While I totally get video hosting is expensive, when it's YouTube (and Google in general) and their extremely hostile, intrusive, arrogant behavior over UX, I can't stop thinking that they fail and people keep leeching them.
The thing with the paid subscription is that the bastards still track you. Paying for the service does not exclude you from surveillance, it supposedly makes it less obtrusive. Ad-blocker is insufficient for anything close to anonymity, and so is everything else. But it does make the tracking harder and it does move you ever so slightly to the tail of every distribution that matters for fingerprinting.
YouTube ads are cancerous. The blowback will be massive for such a thing. Though, I am not sure if Google will listen as there are some real major costs to streaming at the scale YouTube does.
I hope my sheer stubbornness will keep me from ever subscribing to Youtube premium.
- Google used to have Google Music, which I loved and paid for willingly as it was a good service, the recommendation algorithm was _not bad_, the UI was _okay_, and you could upload your own music and have it integrate with their system.
- Google used to by default allow you to play Youtube in the background and let you use the picture in picture mode for free - they removed that feature and put it behind a paywall.
- You can't volume control ads. I have Youtube playing in the background on my bedside table at night and having consistent volume is key. I don't want blaring audio telling me to buy X product or use Y service, waking me up when I'm trying to sleep. Yet another way for them to convince you to get Youtube premium.
- I hate all forms of advertisements. Don't shove advertisements in my face. If I want a product, I'll look for it and do my own research. I don't want algorithms and AI deciding what I want to purchase. When I've had advertising slip through, it's usually for things that I've already bought recently (mattress, clothing, etc.)
I will continue to willingly eat away at Google's profits for as long as they run YouTube.
I've been looking into some kind of open source solution that automatically grabs my Youtube history playlist and downloads and automatically catalogs these videos on a network share somewhere locally. (If someone can recommend a solution, please feel free!)
Too many times I've had videos that I've added to a playlist be removed for some inane reason (copyright violation, DMCA requests, etc. etc.)
Well said friend, I'm on the same page with almost all of these things!
I have a long term plan to setup a suite of the existing self-hosted front-ends to various services just for me and my immediate family to personally use.
I only block the in video ads because they are so intrusive. I don't mind any of the other ads on the platform and am not against advertising in general. They have also gotten money from me via their 30% cut of super chat fees so I probably do earn Youtube more money than the average user.
I mean if YouTube wants to block ad blockers, that's unfortunate, but I also understand the motivation. But here's the rub. Youtube premium is still not available globally. I had a weird workaround that I used a long time ago through google play but when my current credit card expires, I won't be able to use that method again and all the benefits of my membership will go away. That really sucks because I actually enjoy the ads free experience and the fact that I can pay for it.
I don't understand how a giant company like Google hasn't figured out global availability of a service like this. Especially given that videos can be geo locked if needed.
> don't understand how a giant company like Google hasn't figured out global availability of a service like this
Running a user-generated content business has become exponentially more complicated in the last decade. Compliance and moderation is hard. It's also difficult to scale across jurisdictions.
But the content is present globally. We are talking about a subscription to block ads. If it’s to do with some YouTube original content, they can not distribute it here for all I care. I’ve seen that content and it’s awful.
If it’s about tax collection, then that’s again weird because google will take money for any other service. I genuinely don’t understand it and I can’t find a single good explanation out there for it either.
Sorry if that comes across as aggressive. I promise that it’s entirely just exasperation at this point :(
Google is just the middle man here, creators can turn off ads on videos if they want to but a lot of them need revenue or at least want revenue so the question becomes what's the best way to reward creators for their work? There are multiple models that I can think of but there will be much less people on yt if it would cost even a few cents. Once you're used to free stuff, even with bloated content as now it takes a while to get used to paying. The current model works because 3rd parties pay and not the actual consumer.
I'm curious how does yt share profit with creators for views from paying subscribers.
My beef with Youtube is that it keeps showing me the same suggestions over and over. I do use an ad blocker, originally installed for security reasons.
I have found a lot of good content on YT, but lately, the suggestions are just terrible and the "hunt" is taking longer and getting frustrating - sort of like Netflix, which I cancelled. I'm guessing they keep suggesting videos that make the most money for Google, even if I don't want to watch it. If the content suggestions on YT were better, I might consider subscribing to it, but with the way it is now, ads will definitely push me to leave.
the people who have a blockers enabled are also the lest likely to click an ad or buy anything advertised . advertisers should want these people to not be shown ads.
The people who have ad blockers installed are an extremely self-selective demographic who have taken a physical action. This type of demographic is extraordinarily valuable to sell advertising to.
Which is why allowing self serve adverts would benefit everyone. Uccasionally I want to see related items for sale, but there is no option if the video uploader hasnt already put monitized affiliate links. Seems like its leaving money, and viewer satisfaction, on the table.
Bingo. I would prefer a related items list I can click on. I might not use it often, but have nevwr in my life voluntarily clicked a banner ad or link thru a video ad.
Does YT detect that the ad wasn't played and therefore doesn't pay out for that view to the creator?
From an incentives perspective, putting the onus on the creators to convince their viewers to enable ads might be more effective, but on the other hand that feels kind of shitty to do to creators, so IDK if it's ultimately a good idea...
When I first started using Youtube in late 2006, it didn't have ads, and I didn't have an ad-blocker because I didn't know they existed. Since then, I've more or less used Youtube the same way as I did. I use an ad-blocker now as part of my normal web browsing, and it, thankfully, happens to work on Youtube, giving me that same experience. If I eventually lose the ability to use ad-blockers on Youtube, I'll probably just wind up using it a lot less. I'm not sure I want to add yet another monthly payment.
YouTube could pay me to watch ads, they are using the processing power of my computer and the electricity I pay to show them. It's not like TV where nothing actually changes and I can't disable them.
This move will hurt badly those content creators who appeal to a more knowledgeable user base, but I will not watch YouTube without an AD blocker.
I am probably in the vast minority, I understand it, both my father and my nephews don't know that there was a version of the internet without ads and that you could block them.
I do my best to keep the ads on when I'm using services that are ads-sustained, but... Come on YouTube, you're throwing several minutes long ads at me, and if I don't click "skip" because I'm washing the dishes, then instead of compensating me for watching it by going to the video (as you do when I hit "skip"), you throw another ad at me because you know that I'm likely unable to skip that as well.
Also I'm more and more convinced that YouTube listens on my microphone for running water.
Question for anyone who bought YouTube Premium and tried to cancel later: how did it go?
Years ago I bought a Chromecast for a family member but ended up sending it back because it was subpar. The return process was so frustrating (not to mention the difficulty in deleting the mandatory Google Wallet account) that I vowed to never trust Google with any money again. I feel I’d rather stop watching YouTube entirely.
I’m interested in experiences, good and bad, of cancelling as YouTube Premium.
LPT: Use a Syrian VPN and Google won't advertise to you in any of their products (due to sanctions). Only use this for read-only content (YouTube, Search et al).
He does have an idea. Are there any VPNs that let you acquire an Iranian IP? Iran is not even a geotargeting option in Google ads because of all the sanctions. I've always wondered what Google search results looked like from inside the country? Pure and ad free?
YouTube's quality deteriorated. The amount of ads is obnoxious. Lack of dislike button to check, if a video of worth it probably inflated the view rate. They try to squeeze as much money as possible (hey Preference Max - we know it's only to allocate some of the money in the platform), until TikTok takes over.
I don't need YT, the content they host is not worth paying and I wouldn't have a problem to live without it.
I think they’ve been testing this for a while. Noticed a couple of ads slipping through uBlock on Mac Safari a few months back. Haven’t seen it happen recently, though.
Personally I don’t mind a few ads, but the volume of them was just getting completely out of control for a while there on YouTube. It’s what prompted me to finally install an ad blocker!!
If YouTube blocks me from watching videos because I use an ad blocker then I'll stop watching videos on YouTube. I don't care if this doesn't hurt YouTube... it will help me stop spending so much time on YouTube.
Oh gosh, really? Don't you think you'll come back after a few weeks?
I think the bigger impact is that it'll impede new user adoption. I use an adblocker (but pay for YouTube,) and I never use sites that block me for using an adblocker.
You state you never use sites that block adblockers, right after disagreeing (questioning? Exclaiming??) with the parent for for expressing the exact same point?
100% this, I'm not watching ads. I haven't really seen any advertising on my electronic devices in a decade (edit: actually closer to two decades) and that's the way it will continue to be. My time is valuable, my mental space is valuable, my computer is mine. You will not make it do things I don't want it to do. Advertising is a plague on society.
(I speak from experience, I worked for 3 years at an ad agency.)
Honest question - why not? I am paying for Youtube Premium, it's not different to me than paying for Netflix or Spotify. I'm using a service which I like so I don't mind supporting it. If it helps me get rid of ads, so much the better.
it's certainly different than Netflix given that they actually make content. On Youtube you're just paying a tax to the fiefdom. Given that a lot of creators have patreon which takes a miniscule cut I'd rather pay creators as directly as possible.
Paying a company with a market dominating position 150 bucks per year to not hold me hostage with blocked UI functions is kind of ridiculous.
While I agree with your comment there is something seriously wrong with the fact that Google can use its infinite funds so that a serious competitor for YT never has any chances of appearing. If YT were a standalone company and would compete on fair terms in others, we might see some reasonable business models appear.
We know how much Netflix spends on content. In 2022, it was 52% of their revenue ($16.7B content budget, $32B revenue). We also know how much YouTube pays for the content, since their ad revenue split has been public for like a decade. It's 55% to the creators for the content, 45% to YouTube for the technical and social infrastructure.
Huh. Looks like YouTube pays more for their content than Netflix does! Given the only stated basis for your opinion turned out to be incorrect, are you changing your mind?
No, that napkin math doesn't check out unless you think Youtube is a non-profit. They pocket half of what creators make, and that has no relationship to their infrastructure cost, it's a function of their market power. They could change that revenue split tomorrow to 70/30 while they cut infrastructure costs for all you or I know.
You somehow turned my argument on its head. I don't care how much Netflix or YT pay for content, I only care that I pay directly for content, and because Netflix is a media company, not a platform, I don't need to guess how much they're squeezing creators or consumers. I transparently pay for a movie catalog, and that is the service provided.
Any money i could give to google is a drop in their ocean of ad revenue, that's why. Google is being disingenuous af, nothing new. Also Youtube has become so important it should be much more regulated.
Google would be one of the last companies I would shove money into, voluntarily.
All the ads that YT shows are paid by us when we buy products of companies that pay Google to show ads.
This is how Google is getting all their billions, from you (wether or not you personally watch ads, as long companies believe it's worth giving money for showing ads).
It's such a parasitic business model that I am glad I can be a parasite to Google
You prevent YT and Content Creators from making money when you block an ad.
Blocking ads of these products, means when you purchase a product (shampoo, razors, etc) more of your money goes into these companies that created these products.
And, in your case, who pays the content creator for the content you enjoy? and who pays for the engineering and infrastructure that delivered the content?
And, since you never saw the ad, you likely didn't buy any product either.
> And, since you never saw the ad, you likely didn't buy any product either.
That's the big con behind ads, especially online ads. If there was research showing that ads don't make any difference at all for the vast majority of purchases ...
Secondly, ads are a more insidious version of the old visa scam. They're a tax on everyone, whether they viewed the ad or not. I avoid ads, and where I can't I actively avoid the product. It's not even about being cheap, I am actively disgusted at ads these days, and that transfers to the product being advertised. I doubt I'm the only one.
Thirdly, already Youtube ads don't allow "normal" content creators to survive. Not enough money. So youtube is a con. Content creators won't keep creating ... and it doesn't matter what you do. Youtube is a pyramid scheme, in that it's making the promise of jobs, even richess if you just "produce content", and it's dependent on a constant flow of fresh suckers taking that bet. Nearly all of them will lose big.
Just about every one of "my favorite creators" have a video complaining about it (those videos are really becoming boring), yet the vast majority of their views are monetized, so even "fixing" ad blocking 100% won't help them.
sounds like you're avoiding paying creators and just making up 'rationales' for continuing to not support them. if you're unwilling to support creators and unwilling to participate in creator economy and creator platforms by watching ads - then don't participate in all parts of that creator ecosystem - don't watch their content. creators participate in it by putting their content out there. but you're selectively picking what's most beneficial to you, and watch the content while refusing to compensate creators for it in those ways, intended by the platforms, and by creators themselves, who intentionally enable monetization of their content. good for you, but the 'virtuousness' of 'not participating in platform racket' isn't checking out.
Paying or not paying into an unsustainable system is not moral, or immoral, it is only stupid. Youtube, just like Uber, Amazon and Alibaba are temporary things that cannot survive. They won't survive the influx of new "creators", and the quality is already racing to the bottom, as is the money paid out to Youtubers. I enjoy them, aware that certain events are RACING towards us.
So here's my attitude: if I'm falling to my death out of a plane, the end result completely out of my control, I hope I'll spend the time fantasizing about elaborate ways to save myself and generally enjoy the way down. Same with Youtube and other gig economy "let's underpay everyone!" attitude ... I'm not convincing myself nothing's going wrong. I'm aware fantasy doesn't change a thing. I'm aware I don't change a thing and the only thing that can keep this system going is investors hoping for profit (or a greater fool). And so I enjoy the fall.
"And wow! Hey! What’s this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like … ow … ound … round … ground! That’s it! That’s a good name – ground!
I pay the content creator, if I don't want him to go away: liberapay or Patreon
Otherwise I am already paying a fee for public broadcasters of my country.
I probably bought a product, because almost every company does ads.
This means I pay for YouTube, I pay for GMail, I pay for Android, I pay for GDocs, etc. although I don't even want to use it.
I'd rather had Android died in favor of Windows Phone
YT Premium only makes the problem worse by requiring you to log in using an account that is tied to your real world identity and was used for payment processing. You just end up giving more data points to Google to track you, cross-reference with other sources and shove more ads in other platforms, still get native ads, and Google can just add their own ads later (as it is happening step by step with streaming companies).
One thing for me is that the youtube app stops the audio when the phone locks. I want to listen to a video while I'm driving, I'll even put up with the ads, but I actually can't do it unless I use an alternative front-end app - which is how I've solved the problem.
Restricting background-play is an active choice on Youtube's part to prevent what I would consider a basic function and hold it hostage behind their paywall.
That behaviour fucks me off such that I refuse to sponsor it.
Because it’s giving money to Google? Plus half the problem is the tracking, they’re not going to stop tracking me if I pay them, and then I have to use it logged in which just makes the tracking easier.
I'm not going to be extorted lol. If you're showing me something I have a right to ignore the parts I don't care about, and I have a right to have a computer do the ignoring for me so I don't waste my time/mental effort.
Extremely obvious case of apples not being oranges, in the sense of user-generated content not being the same as studio/production company generated content.
Just a passerby, but content isn't fungible; no one is replacing Technology Connections with House of the Dragon or vice versa. The diversity of YouTube's content, the back catalog, its default status, network effects, integration with devices and services, and so much more make it hard to replace.
And we shouldn't forget, rando users can upload whatever for sharing, which none of your alternatives do. Kind of the core idea there.
I love Technology Connections FWIW, completely changed how I use my dishwasher!
And I would disagree re: content isn't fungible. Nothing on YouTube is both necessary to specifically consume and entirely unavailable elsewhere. It's entertainment, and whatever "category" of entertainment you prefer, you can find content not on YouTube for that thing.
"Random users uploading content" has not been the primary use case of YouTube for many years now. It's mostly run by content creators now, with entire companies dedicated to creating content, just the same as the platforms I've listed.
I must confess I still don't understand why ads are not a CFAA violation. I mean, what are the website operators going to argue? That you voluntarily configured your user agent to display them? That argument is far too dangerous to the advertisers.
I can get stuck in a bit of a loop watching videos, but on the whole I think YouTube is an incredible resource. I've learnt so many things from it, I think it's worth working out how to use it in moderation rather than just cutting it out
I just cannot wrap my head around folks who demand content for free. How do you think the people who create this content would survive if they couldn't do it for money???
Some of us are from a time before the web was commercialized. The answer to your question is we couldn't care less. If these people who make "content" as a means of making money go bankrupt, it's no skin off our backs. It will make more room for people who host genuine works on the web.
Then I have no sympathy for you. You want to live in a world that does not exist, and your desire to do that harms the very people you claim to support, the content creators.
I'm not who you were talking to as a heads up, but as someone who blocks ads, I frankly just don't care. I view ads as a security risk and as psychological warfare. If Google thinks it worthwhile to invest resources and manages to successfully stop my blocking, fair enough, but otherwise I'm going to continue to optimize for my own well being. Google will go on continuing to be one of the richest and most powerful / influential companies on earth, and the small fraction of ad revenue that the content creator would miss out on from my ad-blocking, well, cost of doing business.
I've stopped visiting Twitch because their ad's are annoying to block. I'll stop visiting youtube if the same happens. I refuse to engage with ads if I have a choice. I've given money to a handful of people on Patreon that I want to support, but otherwise I have greater problems to deal with than the small fractions of a cent that these creators lose by me blocking.
"I don't care" is a logic, but it's not... sustainable, right? The current dynamic of some people being of your mind but most people being not that way works, but let me introduce you to the Tragedy of the Commons [0].
Or it will just lead to more sponsored segments and product placement in "free" videos. Every semi-popular youtuber already has segments where they stop the actual content and talk about NordVPN or HelloFresh or Manscaped.
It's hard for me to find good reviews of Synthesizers because almost every video about a new one is a sponsored video where the instrument was given to the youtuber for free.
I have observed a more insidious problem - the Youtubers that used to be genuine and down to earth are now themselves compromised by being sent products to give their honest opinion.
The other day I was watching a video about this nice couple who wanted to start their bulldozer that was frozen in the forest and suddenly they pull out this "powerbank 1300" (name deliberately changed) and started a sales spiel ! About how they have all these gopros and iphones and look how many ports this thing has, and how it can charge the dead dozer battery blah blah.
Matthias Wandel today released a video about a Ecobank 1300 - I am shocked at how the content creators themselves have become a poisoned well !
These 1300WH banks are waaay overpriced for the amount it would cost to buy the individual 18650 cells (probably $100 worth of cells being sold for $999), so these content creators are shills and sellouts to these marketing tactics.
I'm hoping a large part of the cost is in safety. It would be grossly irresponsible to just string together a bunch of budget 18650 cells to try and make a bigger battery. It's junk like this that has caused entities like the NYCHA to straight up ban ebikes (cheap conversion kits for ebikes seem to be giant fire hazards).
Ad blocker awareness is still pretty low among non-tech folks. Google will presumably wait for some critical mass of users blocking ads before if pushes this.
Wonder what the economics of this is for Google? Would they rather have everyone pay $12 a month and nix ads altogether?
I suspect they still would want most people watching ads, considering how central their ads business is to their business model.
I am kind of on the fence about the content on YouTube being worth paying for but the website makes it so difficult to find the content that I am actually interested in seeing that it makes the whole experience absolutely not worth it to me to pay for.
Faced with blocked videos I would either figure out a way around or do something else with my time. No way I'm disabling my ad blocker.
I feel exactly the same way. Majority of the content I actually want to watch is very difficult to find and the remaining content I get sucked into consuming would be better spent reading a book instead.
They might be doing me a favour by blocking ad blockers lol
I'd happily pay 5€ per month for YouTube premium just to get rid of the ads, but (at least in Germany) you also get YouTube music, so it's 16€.
I don't understand this pricing at all. They're excluding all potential customers that already have a Spotity or Apple Music subscription - becaus who want's to pay twice for the same content?
Google’s ad business is looking not so great these days as they increasingly lose out to the walled off app gardens they can’t get into.
It’s generally not a great sign for a business when the focus of your innovations turns into increasingly aggressive ways to force folks to consume something they obviously don’t want.
If you use FreeTube it will buffer a second stream of the video started just before ad spots then stream-and-discard the ads. When you get to an ad spot it cuts to the buffer from the second stream while the ad in your primary stream buffers.
It can also optionally stream through mirror services like invidious that also strip all ads.
In short, you can -always- access content provided to the anonymous internet without ads without the provider being able to tell.
The creators even get paid for ads you never watched.
If everyone does this advertisers will stop paying, and we can move on from this failed experiment and build better microtransaction systems.
Never ever watch or listen to ads or give data to adtech companies. This is always doing more harm to society than alternatives like piracy or violating terms of service.
I currently have YouTube Music, and have looked into getting Premium a couple of times, because I watch enough YT content to want the ads disabled everywhere. But for some reason they won't let me. If I go to the YT Premium page, they tell me I can't do anything there, and I have to go to my account page, where of course there is nothing to do either. I suppose I could cancel my YT Music subscription and then try to sub YT Premium, but with notoriously bad customer support and a number of family members using it also, I kind of don't want to go deal with that also not working and me having to go through the hassle of getting everybody in again.
If they want to sell premium so badly, maybe they should actually let me buy it.
The only reason I watch YouTube is because it’s free and ad-blockable.
But why in the world would I want to pay to support YouTube’s toxic incentives, abusive copyright takedowns, and overall rubbish treatment of small content creators?
The day Adblock stops working is the day I stop watching YouTube.
The thing is it was youtube that pushed me to using an addblock in the first place. I was happy with umatrix, hell I preferred it, For the most part I did not mind ads, as long as they were served from the same domain. I put up with youtube ads for a long while but they got so obnoxious I started looking to see if an actual add blocker could make things better, it did and I have not gone back.
At this point it is an arms race. I don't think out right refusing to serve the video will fly for long, the next target is to make the noise(the ad) undecidable from the signal. They already sort of tried this, which made it hard for umatrix to filter out the ads. but they will get better at it.
Admittedly I'm not the target audience but for me the percentage of decent videos I'd watch on YouTube Vs the amount of shite on there is sub 0.001. If this happen to me I'd just not watch the video. I never going to pay for premium.
I stopped listening to the radio because of ads. There are podcast I don't listen to anymore because sponsors are so invasive. I installed sponsor block (which I would gladly pay for) to may youtube bearable. I pay for spotify for peace of mind.
I love youtube, but If I can't watch it without being pestered by ads and without giving all my information to google, I will simply do something else.
I would be ok paying for youtube premium if Google were actually not abusing their customers at any chance they get. But since they will spy on you, delete your accounts, cancel services, encourage take down abuses, I really don't want to put my whole life in their hand.
The thing is, even when I don't block ads, their shitty sites fail to load ads on my browsers because they aren't main stream. In case you don't know, your user agent will cause any google site to act wildly different.
i'm conflicted, because youtube is amazing and has the greatest content on the internet, its easily capable of replacing teachers and this is the most valuable thing you could ever have.
and on the other hand, i adblock anything that looks at me the wrong way. i'm not sure where to go on this.
i've seen some creator-based ads that i would be willing to look into purchasing, but that doesn't actually benefit youtube as a company, is it simply up to me to rely on people who have never heard of adblock as these folk steadily decline out over the next couple decades? i guess premium it is. i don't mind supporting the platform.
My main worry is not so much this change, but rather when they decide that this also applies to Premium. I've been paying for a bit, and run an ad blocker. I'm concerned that it will be too tempting start putting ads back into Premium and require ad blockers be disabled. Of course I'm speculating, but this is the scenario where I'm out.
I could also see them splitting Premium into "Basic Premium", "Grand Premium", and "Ultimate Premium" where one shows some ads and the other shows "minimal" ads.
I started paying for Premium when they blocked Vanced. It is so worth it. I kind of feel bad that I used Vanced for so long. The experience is the same, with the added download functionality but missing swipping up and down on one side of the video for the volume and the other side for the brighness. Plus I am ad free regardless of where I view my content regardless of an adblocker being available or not. Honestly, if you use the educational/tutorial side of YouTube as much as possible, this is as much a no-brainer as GPT Plus.
The thing with adverts on mobile, where the ad block hasn't worked for ages now, is I can always block them by putting the phone down for 20 seconds (or whatever length the advert is).
Having to do this for an un-skippable 20 second ad for one minute video, however, makes me press the back button.
That said, the new plays-even-if-you-can't-see-them ad-block-proof ads on desktop are annoying to the point I'm considering just giving up on the website, possibly going to the other places like Nebula and old-fashioned podcasts instead.
Personally whenever I find videos I like on YouTube I will immediate send them into yt-dlp and save it locally to view after the fact.
At this point the amount of advertising has become so pervasive that I’ve lost all care. This “monetization” game as far as I’m concerned is blackmail to creators as their content is heavily regulated by the platform and god forbid you say the wrong thing and then all the money you would get per view goes away but the ads will continue playing because someone else is going to get that money.
I've seen a browser extension that analyzes the video using AI to detect the sponsored segments, so detecting the ads would be probably even easier since they are even more disconnected from the normal content than sponsors.
I'm not sure why they would fail if they really wanted to.
From what I understand, currently, the ads are distinct videos, which is why external tools can block them. For example, you don't get ads with youtube-dl.
But if Youtube used the uploaded video to create a new one, with ads injected in it, I can't see how adblockers could block that reliably. Perhaps you could build a database of timestamp of ads per video? And hope that the compute power required to build new videos with ads in it is too much to be done widely?
Like, per video on the server stitch in ads to the video file before serving it up? You'd still have to have specific behaviours encoded to specific segments of that video file (i.e. clicking on the video during ad should link somewhere different than clicking on the video during the video), and that would probably be detectable.
Writing's on the wall. As soon as they make ads mandatory, a competitor with no ads and better support will look a lot more attractive, and they could eventually face an exodus.
That competitor will also bleed ridiculous amounts of money for years paying for infrastructure, legal costs, and rising engineering needs. That is, until they also start doing the same thing. Everyone here complains about what Google is doing to YouTube, but financially speaking this is the only thing they can do for now, YouTube has always been ridiculously expensive to run and hard to monetize, and with last year ad revenue not meeting expectations + the current economic scenario I don't see what else they should do.
Either the competitor has no ads and doesn't charge money, at which point it would bleed money, or it charges a fee, and hence would be even less successful than youtube.
I would be happy if Youtube Premium contained some form of sponsor blocking/skipping. I don't wanna pay not to see ads, and then being fed them anyway.
> It's their site, they pay for the resources, provide the work, if they want to block people who block their ads, they have that right.
> You are not entitled to my website because I put it up.
Yup, I absolutely agree. But if you want people to pay for your site, then you must force users to log in to use your content.
If you put your site up without a login portal then your site is free. Advertisements sent to anonymous users are not a valid option: they are easily gamed, easily abused, and easily contain malicious content. If you want to serve advertisements, that's your business, but do it to users who have clearly opted into it.
If users don't want that then they won't sign up to your site. It's a win-win on both sides.
I'm not trying to block people who use adblockers or make experience worse. There are other reasons why someone might want to know if some portion of users are using adblockers. I personally use uBlock.
it's a heuristic based approach, but essentially, you ensure that your ad-script would set some sort of global variable, or a property somewhere, and your detection script would look for that property. If it's not set, you have a good probability that the ad was blocked.
Don't use ad services that collect user data and serve personalized ads. Find someone who actually wants to advertise THEIR AD on YOUR SITE, and present it as regular content.
If you are trying to subvert people's ad block, you are doing it wrong.
I don't serve ads on a website and I'm not blocking users who use adblockers. I'm trying to find a reliable way to detect usage of adblockers for legitimate analysis.
the end is nigh. tragic, but inevitable. adblockers are the only thing that make YT worth using. honestly hard to imagine ever going back to that site once adblockers are kaput.
I would paid for Youtube Premium if I could get it for $11.99 a month. But since I used Youtube TV in the past my price is $15.99 a month and that’s not a price I want to pay.
I once visited YouTube without an ad blocker - that was a ridiculous experience, I can't believe there are people who tolerate that and watch it this way routinely.
It would be interesting if we could create some sort of digital Suica Card, where someone can load their eSuica up and whenever they visit a website that's in on the plan they can view the website without ads, without needing to subscribe, and the site would automatically charge like 3 cents (or whatever) to their card.
Maybe Brave works like that, IDK, I don't use it, but I would like to see something like that in Firefox.
Gosh I hope Youtube doesn't shoot it's unicorn in the face. With the number of adds that the youtubers themselves sell, it's just a bit too much. I'd be happy for this if I knew it wasn't going to just be google raking in all the money to themselves but instead had some form of payment partnership with the creators that was fair and equitable.
Content creators receive approximately 55% of the revenue generated on their channels. What is fair and equitable to you? Bear in mind that the other 45% is not pure profit for YT as most of it pays for hosting, development etc.
Progressive taxation makes sense when you're talking about actual tax, but why does it make sense for content creators? If anything, less popular creators cost Google more, because one 10GB video with 1,000,000 views is cheaper to host and serve than ten 10GB videos each with 100,000 views.
Anyway, I think we can all agree that both content and platform are necessary here, and letting content creators take home over half the revenue seems, I dunno, at least within the realm of fairness? Seems to be working pretty well for Mr Beast.
I occasionally get recommendations for videos of like 6 hour gameplay stream VODs with under 20 views. When I look at their channel they upload almost daily, 4-6 hours of them just silently playing a video game. I can't imagine how much it costs them to host one channel with hundreds or thousands of hours of video and about 10k views across the entirety of the channel history.
Kinda off topic - I'm not a dev at all, I'm wondering how inefficient it would be for creators to self host their videos? How necessary are the youtube servers?
Other than that I see that the algorithm has some value in showing you things you wouldn't otherwise...but I'm not sure that's actually wanted or needed.
How impossible would it be to have an internet without centralized video hosting?
It is just not possible unless you have too few views (and that is ignoring all the tech know how required which is so so far beyond the average person). Look at this Vimeo example (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28547578)
All that would do from their perspective is save them additional bandwidth if you're not making them money by watching ads. I'm sure they'd rather you didn't watch and consume the product for free.
YouTube seems to be slowly forcing users to think about alternatives. For me, having ads interrupt video was the line I hoped they would never cross, and I see this as something that will drive users away in the long term. Showing me 4-5 ads for videos shorter than 10 minutes is quite ridiculous, and as a result my viewing has significantly dropped.
I have youtube premium but I still prefer ad blockers or other clients if available. The funny part is even with premium, youtube is not giving you the best experiencen others do
For PC i have sponsor block which allows me to skip ads in videos
For TV i am using smarttube, an unofficial client which imo better and more customisable than the official one. Plus it also supports sponsor block
Eradicate malware injection through java script and google ads, and I will consider it.
Also, if it's not individually personalized, and uncensored. You know; How YouTube used to be in the early 2000s.
Give me what I want, don't collect my stuff, don't try to mess with me, and allow me to remain anonymous, and I would be willing to pay for it –anonymously, of course.
They should have done so long ago, but I guess they had other concerns, like building a moat. Paid content needs to be normalized on the internet, because people expecting services for free just drives providers to be toxic in a myriad of other ways. And YT Premium is ridiculously cheap for the value the brings.
I would probably pay if it was a standalone service with an easy sign up.
But somehow everything that I have to do through Google makes me cringe the amount of friction I'll have to go through. Unclear whether this perception is justified, as I never even tried to sign up to YouTube Premium (though intended often).
YouTube Premium is one of the very few subscription services I use. It's easily worth it. Browsing through the universe of random YouTube videos about the various quirky hobbies I'm into is immensely enjoyable, and I appreciate that at least some of my money goes to the video creators.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Ad blocker detection is an arms race and considering how big YouTube is, people will definitely fight back and go very far out of their way to avoid ads. This could get really ugly given that Google controls Chrome and its extension ecosystem.
> This could get really ugly given that Google controls Chrome and its extension ecosystem.
It would eventually give them the smokescreen they want to pull uBlock Origin from the chrome extension store. A while ago they basically used their weight to remove most video downloading extensions and added language to their terms of service which all but says "no youtube downloaders" and I would like to say it cost them, because it should, but most consumers are absurdly apathetic and don't care.
Adblockers are a larger group, but in the grand scheme of things I don't think it will have much impact. The Internet as a whole is a very large group and even though uBlock has a huge audience it's a drop in the bucket.
It’s not an arms race. Twitch has already figured it out. It’s absolutely impossible to use any sort of adblocker on twitch. It’s so bad that the best solution to “block ads” on twitch is to use a proxy to a country that isn’t serving ads.
Unless twitch has some crazy way of inserting ads into the video stream, YouTube will be able to do exactly what twitch has done.
> It’s absolutely impossible to use any sort of adblocker on twitch.
I have never seen any ads on twitch. I just checked with DevTools and it seems like uBlock Origin simply blocks a script called "v6s.js", that is apparantly responsible for serving ads.
idk what to tell you. I have uBlock Origin on and without the proxy I see ads all the time. Either you're not in the US or you're just lying. There's a thread on the uBlock origin website with over 1,000 comments of people saying the same thing.
There's also posts their daily about how ads are not being blocked on twitch anymore.
"There is zero chance I am ever deactivating it or paying for Premium now, that ship has sailed."
Hmm, if google starts banning accounts they would deactivate it in a heartbeat. This is what I’m mostly afraid of when using adblockers. I don’t want to wake up to a banned account.
Does anyone have experience choosing from the many many options of OTP providers to serve original content? Every time I look into it, the sheer gamut of companies offering these services is overwhelming, seems impossible to differentiate and make an informed decision.
We all agree ads on Youtube are horrible. They waited until we were trapped there to turn them on. The price of Youtube prime is also insane compared to Netflix.
What's the conclusion to this? Should Netflix start a Youtube competitor?
Youtube Premium is €11.99 per month here, including YouTube Music. Spotify is €9.99. The pricing seems very fair to me as long as you make use of the music offering.
I would pay for a way to block YouTube entirely. Every smart tv, tablet, game system seems to have a non-removable YouTube app preloaded. I ended up setting up having to set up a piehole and blocked it there, but the kids will eventually figure out a work around.
Ads, the way are made today, totally destroy the experience, therefore I'm prepared to say good riddance to YT.
Also, good luck with that; this will only mean that once there is enough demand, a video will be downloaded and shared through bittorrent.
I got tired of keeping up the arms race with ad blockers. So now I just pay them. So, it worked on me I guess. I watch youtube more than Netflix and I pay for that every month too.
Ironically, I would be positively excited about Youtube really forcing ads by detecting and blocking adblockers. It would be the most effective measure against my high Youtube consumption.
The YouTube app is a lousy user experience. The ads are the most intrusive and irrelevant of any service since commercial TV. For those reasons alone I would never become a paying customer. What’s worse is they have established themselves as yet another guardian of ideas. Content creators have to be careful not to talk about topics that are deemed out of line by the current msm and liberal zeitgeist. They could have been a great venue for debate during covid for example, but they censored and deplatformed world renowned scientists and doctors who dared question the cdc and wh. YouTube has the best content and I suffer through their UX to consume it but would leave as soon as there is an alternative
Even if they were willing to pay $12 per month to hide ads, YouTube Premium is not available in all countries, so those people would have to use an adblocker.
It seems like youtube is ripe to be disrupted by someone. Video hosting isn't as hard as it once was, ads are invasive, and yt is just the middleman not the content creators.
the closest alternative to Youtube I have seen is Odysee (formerly known as LBRY) https://odysee.com/
it reminds me of the old youtube experience. I like that their ads are images and banners rather than video interruptions. the content and viewerbase are a bit limited at the moment but that can easily change.
I think aside from everything that's been mentioned already, i feel that companies are being very manipulative about these things.
The games industry is a good example, they tune many games so that they're less fun and then try to upsell you some way to circumvent the less fun parts.
I feel the same is true for youtube, twitch etc.
I used to watch both without adblock, the amount of ads were generally okay. I didn't mind them much.
Now i feel they've become unbearable in number and style. Especially on youtube, where they often need interaction or they will run for 2+ minutes.
So watching it on TV is like some clicker exercise with the remote every 3 minutes. Many ads are also unskippable now and much louder than the content watched, they come at bad timings and interrupt the flow.
Have they tuned this to oblivion so their product sucks on purpose without subscribing?
My problem with Youtube Premium is that it doesn't work if you are incognito. I don't understand why I need to sell my data if I am paying for a service. If I watch a cute animal video on a whim, I would get inundated with animal videos.
I used to use Premium, but then I stopped because I don't get anything in return.
Now it's just extortion from a criminal who says "pay money or you'll watch a lot of terrible ads".
What I get is third-party clients (on my phone) or plugins on my PC:
- can be removed from the subscriptions feed: community messages (I came to watch videos, not read posts).
- remove premieres (announcements, when it comes out then I'll watch it).
- remove short videos
- delete broadcasts
- choose to download h264 (because few laptops and phones support AV1, which is currently decoded by the processor, heating the device and draining batteries)
- disable video track downloading if you need only sound (including in the terrible YouTube music)
- view dislikes
- disable translation of video titles. It's annoying when the title is in English or, for example, my native language, and the video turns out to be in Vietnamese, Indian, and doesn't have an additional audio track or at least subtitles.
- Blocking video channels I don't like
- blocking videos with titles in a language that is not interesting or pleasant to my ears (for example, Indian or Vietnamese).
- sponsor block (integrated advertising, as in ltt, half of the video is advertising), and this is with mediocre content that is better prepared by blockchain games with a much smaller budget.
- selection of video quality, without resetting the settings
- setting the subtitle position (top/bottom)
- downloading videos in open video and audio formats (for offline viewing on the go in a convenient player)
- And finally, blocking the usual YouTube ads.
There are many more small features in the mobile apps.
What's in it for me with YouTube? Nothing!
- YouTube could create several levels of subscriptions.
- Create your own sponsor block. If a video has embedded ads, skip them and show your own. Or in the settings, give the author a choice: either he earns only from integrated advertising or YouTube advertising.
- All the other functions provided by plugins (and this is on the client side, there are no costs on the server side).
- warnings about deletion or skimming of videos in my playlist (I have 40% of videos in my music playlist for 5 years, and I don't know which videos were deleted to find the originals).
- YouTube can reduce its costs by banning uploads, or by strictly moderating stupid videos of 10 hours, which are looped 10-second snippets and the like, videos for cats, dogs, snails and fantasy animals that will never buy anything from ads.
- For podcasters, making it possible to download audio and previews is already a savings, because there is no need to store a meaningless "video".
And also big problems with YouTube:
- terrible search and filter.
- It takes a lot of computer resources.
- You complain about the channels not being shown to me, but they are shown anyway.
- videos/channels are blocked automatically for unknown reasons and complaints from the left heel of some offended mama's son
- the same thing is shown in shorts
If YouTube closes the api and pushes through a manifesto so that adblockers don't work, or work terribly. Then I will use YouTube as a regular site that I will visit once or twice a month, that is, it will definitely not be a premium subscription, and there will be a meager viewing of ads. AMD has also introduced a new streaming board, and more of them will appear, and separate blogger communities will be formed that are independent of YouTube, and YouTube will have an outflow.
Among my friends and acquaintances, almost no one uses YouTube anymore because it's not convenient. More of them are on social networks, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. That is, most of them will not even notice the death of YouTube, because it is almost dead for them, and they go there only when necessary.
It is not just about youtube. The whole internet is bloated with ads right now, and the vast majority of them quite the opposite of discrete.
I just cannot browse the internet without adblocker, it is too slow, but more importantly too distracting. I could count the times that I have found an internet ad interesting in my lifetime using half the fingers of one hand. Personalised or not, the vast majority is useless, badly made, that just takes processing time both for the computer and my brain.
I will not, and probably cannot, pay and subscribe to any random website I am gonna visit to remove ads to make the experience tolerable, when I can just block the ads. If a website says that I have to disable the adblocker to view it, and I cannot go around it, 99% of the times I do not visit it, I do not care. I pay the people I want to support directly and that's it. I use bandcamp to buy the music I like directly. I subscribe to patreon to the ones that I feel they bring value to my life. But for the occasional or ephemeral video or entertainment, I will just as easily live without, as the disruption ads cause is worse than not viewing that content.
I believe it is my right to adjust my browsing experience by affecting how websites are rendered in my browser to a degree I find reasonable, as well as from my side what data tracking I allow, which is already a huge compromise for me (I would rather not allow js by default in most websites). If a website blocks this, I am not going to sacrifise my experience and I am not interested in browsing it.
> I believe it is my right to adjust my browsing experience by affecting how websites are rendered in my browser to a degree I find reasonable, as well as from my side what data tracking I allow, which is already a huge compromise for me (I would rather not allow js by default in most websites).
Agree completely. I know people who are fine with watching ads to support the content creators and I agree. The creators should be compensated but Google are far too agressive with their ads.
Being able to manipulate my own machine and what I want to view is entirely up to me. This can't be infringed.
There is always the option today to block from the client side, but I can see this changing if there's enough money involved.
You also use swype style keyboard input?
I don't but I am on my phone. I'll clean up the grammar shortly!
Oh, I just recognized a specific swypey mistake that I've seen myself make lots of times. But maybe they'd also happen on regular text prediction too? My sister in law regularly uses voice input, and her Whatsapp messages have totally different types of errors.
> Agree completely. I know people who are fine with watching ads to support the content creators and I agree. The creators should be compensated but Google are far too agressive with their ads.
The part I dislike about this is that they will demonetize a video for content reasons, but still show ads on it.
I also don't know how it works with YouTube Premium. If I have Premium and I watch a creator, does YouTube pay them some tiny % of my subscription fee to offset the ads that I'm no longer watching?
I feel like that's not likely
> If I have Premium and I watch a creator, does YouTube pay them some tiny % of my subscription fee to offset the ads that I'm no longer watching?
I'm not a content creator but Google do claim that a small % of the pool goes to the creators you watch, I guess kind of like a Spotify model.
> Will creators still be paid with YouTube Premium? Yes. In fact, YouTube Premium gives a secondary revenue stream for creators in addition to what you're already earning today through ads.
[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276?hl=en#zipp...
> I also don't know how it works with YouTube Premium. If I have Premium and I watch a creator, does YouTube pay them some tiny % of my subscription fee to offset the ads that I'm no longer watching?
> I feel like that's not likely
I believe this is exactly how it works.
Yes. In fact Youtube Premium views are much more valuable to the creator than an ad-supported view.
>I just cannot browse the internet without adblocker, it is too slow, but more importantly too distracting
not saying this applies to you but might it be that ads are distracting enough that they would be an actual accessibility problem affecting people with ADHD - if so is not allowing people to block ads likely to run into legal issues?
Yes! Ad blockers are an accessibility tool for people with executive functioning disorders!
Can you imagine the uproar if a mainstream website blocked screen readers for people with low vision?
Then Google might be liable under various laws that support disabilities, varying per jurisdiction obviously.
All Captcha's could in the USA be illegal aswell under the ADA.... As some people with learning disabilities won't be able to complete them.
I totally agree on this!
Some websites just keep throwing an enormous number of ads into your face to the the extent you start losing consciousness why you came here in the first place.
On computer, you still able to use an AdBlock but on mobile, I suffer terribly, not only because I could not disable ads but because on some sites while you are reading an article a random ad video that took about half of the screen keeps playing and scrolling down with you, even clicking the X doesn’t work most of the time but generally triggers an external link. At the bottom of the page, you start reading “best job offers in XYZ” where this XYZ is your city name deduced from your IP address, the thumbnail, as you might expect, is a “s_x_” girl lying on a bed :(
I know, free content should be supported by ads but I believe this is not the way to do it.
uBlock origin works perfectly with Firefox on mobile, just in case you didn't know.
if on android u-block origin works well on firefox.
If ios you are probably stranded, Hopefully apple allows it's users to block some ads. That is if they don't become an advertising company.
On iOS uBO seems to work in Orion. Losing tab syncing is a shame though.
On iOS you can install AdGuard in Safari (or pay for a few of the other ad-blocker extensions) or install Brave which has an ad-blocker built-in. Both work well in my experience.
On iOS you can install browser extensions from firefox and chrome to the Orion browser.
I've found it a few month back in this threat here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34562553, it is working sufficiently so far, seems even a bit faster than safari to me, too.
If you don't mind using Opera mobile, their ad blocking is very good, at least for the sites I frequent (including youtube). They're Chinese owned now, but I don't ever use it for banking, shopping or social media. For those I use Firefox.
Brave has an adblocker on iOS and android.
The problem with YT is:
- I start the video, an ad is shown within 30 secs.
- I fast forward a few minutes, the SAME ad is shown again.
- I jump to anywhere on the timeline, the SAME ad is shown again.
At least show me something that is relevant, like facebook does. The ads there reflect what I usually look for. On YT, none of the ads are relevant to me, ever.
It's just ridiculous.
At least for YT there's a solution: YT Premium.
Sure, as other comments have said, it doesn't scale to all websites, but youtube isn't just any website.
Does YT Premium block the sponsored ad slots? Because if not, that's a pointless product.
That's fair. Because also probably the people the advertisers want to reach MOST are exactly the people who have the spare money (and willingness to spend it) to shell out for YT Premium.
But yeah I'd pay to get rid of all the "this video is sponsored by brilliant/nordVPN/whatever".
Sigh.
Check out SponsorBlock
You mean embedded native stuff? No, but SponsorBlock does and I use both. YT Premium pays creators for YT views and the analytics don't appreciably differentiate whether you watched an ad or skipped it, so I'm pretty comfortable with the two.
(The apps don't work with SponsorBlock and that does drag, but I mostly don't watch native-advertising videos on my TV so whatever.)
I'm not paying for anything until they remove the "this is the bubble we have prepared for you" recommendation algorithm.
Plus I gladly watch ads, but not the same ads (do the companies pay triple if I watch the same ad from them I wonder) ever again.
Repitition reinforces the ads, just like in other 'learning', advertisers will always want us to retain their ads, I can't see the 'waterboard them with annoying ads' technique going away in any country that Capitalism manages to keep its talons embedded in.
Yeah, but I will never put winter tires on my car, because it's useless where I live. So, maybe, the targeting was subpar. Also, repetition reinforces me to enable ublock again.
The problem for me there is that those ads are usually complete garbage or outright scams. It's not for a real product that I could even buy.
Check out the 'Unhook' browser extension.
You can go directly to the subscriptions tab.
Or hell, Youtube has an API; You can write your own frontend.
> I'm not paying for anything until they remove the "this is the bubble we have prepared for you" recommendation algorithm.
Indeed, and what bothers me most is that it is "one" bubble. I wish there was a selection of tags to choose what mood I am in. Sometimes I only want math and science suggestions, sometimes I want to watch 3Dprinting or FreeCAD video's and other times I just want to discover some music. But Youtube mixes these three different moods together (even though I never play music on Youtube in the morning, nor watch math video's in the late evening). Please Youtube, let me choose my current 'bubble'.
The ios app lets you do that at least. At the top of the Home Screen I can choose “podcast”, “history” etc though within those it’s still recommendation based.
this is only a short term solution as once enough people have YT premium they'll start adding ads in there too
just like cable tv
And more recently Netflix for their ad-supported lowest tier. Not sure if it has been rolled out yet though.
At least for YT there's a solution: YT Vanced
Or other YouTube clients with ads disabled :) There is even a SmartTV YouTube App that works like a charm. It even skips as blocks in the video itself. Only casting then uses the original app with ads.
Edit:// as long as I would need 2 premium accounts for all my active devices I don't accept that as a real solution
Vanced has essentially been disabled recently, unable to play anything. I don't know if YouTube is going on a murdering spree of everything that threatens ads on the platform.
On mobile it's annoying yes, but there is always a working solution around. On TV however the app "SmartTubeNext" seems to update faster than YouTube patches. (Afaik there are multiple Vanced clones like revanced in case you are using the original)
If you have a solution on mobile, please do DM me :) I've tried multiple workarounds and none of them seem to permanently fix the problem
Firefox for Android + Ublock? Throw in Background Video fixer too.
The only missing feature is casting at that point
Revanced with a client version spoof works for me.
Brave?
There's now revanced which works just fine though.
Actually it lives again in the form of Revanced.
You do have to build an APK yourself by applying patches to an official YT APK but it's pretty easy to so with the CLI tool and works a treat.
Also legally much safer than Vance's.
The smart TV YouTube all you're mentioning also allows you to link up your phone's YouTube app with a code in the settings, and then cast without ads
If that works thank you soooo much!
- Ads crank up the volume to 11.
We were watching Eurovision singing contest the other day from YT and my gawd was that annoying. Adds in the middle of every song, volume being cranked up for the adds, and as a icing on the cake, probably due to bug somewhere, the playback went to pause after each ad (iPhone airplaying to AppleTV).
That’s what TV (first, broadcast, and then, cable) was like in the 80s and 90s, and was a small part of why we jumped at internet video.
For TV, there were devices that promised to automatically lower the volume when commercials came on - I don’t remember how they were supposed to work.
I wonder if those devices simply looked at the volume and said, "If it's high [perhaps for a few seconds at a time], then it's probably an ad". Seems like a pretty good heuristic.
I had one of those but it was built into our TV, a Magnavox. It relied on a small black frame that local broadcasters used to insert their ads. National broadcaster like NBC would stream to their local affiliates. And the stream would have blank spaces to an insert their own ads. It’s very fast ,0.1s, that your eye would see briefly but to smart enough electronics was very perceptible. Once the commercial block was detected volume goes down. And the subsequent black frame turns it back up.
It's a tiny algorithm listening to output volume and reacting to drastic changes via the VolUp/Dn buttons on your remote (figuratively): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression
"Night mode", if it is present, should also do this to a lesser extent. I am grateful for this feature in movies where light chit-chat is interrupted by window-shattering explosion sounds.
TV ads (almost) never interrupted the flow of the show you were watching, because the show was specifically designed around the ad breaks. Radio ads always came between songs.
YouTube is now just sticking ads in any old where in videos. The middle of a song. The middle of a sentence. It's revolting, and in many cases it ruins the content you're actually trying to watch.
If you've got a local public broadcaster, you might want to watch the stream via them instead.
Eurovision should usually be free of ads after all.
You know, if someone would constantly burst into rooms shouting at the top of their lungs for you to give them money, we'd beat them with a wrench. Yet this same behavior is not only tolerated and excused, but encouraged, when done in the name of business profits.
And we wonder why society is so fucked up.
Excellent point!!
> And we wonder why society is so fucked up.
I'd rephrase that to "and there are people who want to debate whether blocking advertisements is morally defensible" as this is not so much an indictment of "society" as it is an exposition of the moral bankruptcy of the advertising industry. The question should not be whether blocking ads is morally defensible but the other way around, whether exposing yourself and others to "modern" advertising is defensible - to which the answer is a wholehearted "Hell No".
Give me a catalogue full of ads like the Computer Shopper [1] magazine of yore and I'll sing praise of the advertisers who clearly showed what they sold for which prices. I actually bought the thing - imagine that, paying money for a telephone book-sized magazine filled with nothing but ads - because it was useful in showing what the market had to offer. A modern-day Computer Shopper would be filled with...
...lifestyle-related drivel
...virtue signalling diversity statements without any relation to whatever product is sold
...celebrities doing things they only do because they get millions for it
...clearly stupid clueless men who only make it through their day because they have women and girls to correct their stupid mistakes, bad choices and silly habits
...some more diversity statements but this time with celebrities
...etc.
Now I understand I'm not really part of the target market the advertisers are trying to brainwash and that the nothing-but-a-list-of-products-with-prices style of advertising does not appeal to everyone. Find some other way of reaching your target market which shares the simplicity and honesty of this type of advertising, stop shouting, stop the brainwashing, get rid of the subliminal messaging, ditch the lifestyle drivel, just quit being bottom feeders and get back to advertising products and prices, no more and no less. Unless you want to be beaten with a wrench that is but in that case you better start wearing helmets and toques.
[1] https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-february-1986/C...
> We were watching Eurovision
Eurovision is basically a big tourism add wrapped in a sell of the cheapest, dullest more forgettable pop songs available. Watching publicity is the whole experience
Yeah, I think Facebook has the better algorithms for knowing what I'm interested in.
I use Instagram more than Facebook but quite a few times I've seen ads for things that have caught my attention. I've even bought something because of one.
I've never bought anything by looking at a Google ad. They are almost always something I know about already. What good is an ad for something I know about?
This is how brand advertising works, it's psychological 'trickery' to try and associate that brand with what people find positive, such associations influence us when we make buying choices or when we react to other people's buying choices.
For many years I thought I was immune to such ads, but really I think we are all affected by them -- increased desire for 'things', with reduced happiness for anyone who can't or won't buy them.
> This is how brand advertising works, it's psychological 'trickery' to try and associate that brand with what people find positive, such associations influence us when we make buying choices or when we react to other people's buying choices.
Not sure how cursing at highly repetitive ads that aren’t relevant to me is a considered “positive”.
everyone on HN somehow thinks they are too smart for ads. get over yourself.
So far YouTube's ads haven't convinced me to invest - much less invest with those advertised companies; frankly, I would probably go to my bank if I were to get into investing, I mean I already trust them with my money.
I sometimes wonder if people who are buying ads ever watch YT and see how irrelevant the ads are. Seems like a big waste of advertising budget.
Spaced repetition ;) It works, and they know it.
It doesn't work for me, It just makes me hate the platform even more.
The ad I most frequently get on YouTube - we’re talking three times per video, every other video - is for a shingles vaccine targeted at adults over 60.
No amount of spaced repetition is going to make me, an adult decades under the age of 60, talk to my doctor about that shingles vaccine. This cannot possibly be a truly cost-efficient ad platform.
Thank you for spreading the word about our shingles vaccine. It's nice to see the ad is working.
You are just a little bit extra resistant, but no worries, there are decades to beat you down, chip by chip.
While it is irritating the frequency of them, personally I prefer ads that aren't relevant. I'll spend my money when I want and I don't like to be manipulated by an ad. Plus I like to feel that online marketers know as little about my preferences as possible and are wasting their advertising budget just showing me useless products and services. I'm looking at you Grammarly...
It’s weird that I didn’t realize this for long. Chances are you are probably in market for presumably irrelevant products, it’s only that a lot of us don’t find those topics entertaining.
I wouldn’t mind a nice representative calmly onboarding me with an exciting new middle eastern investment opportunities, I might even enjoy listening to those with a glass of tap water on one hand. That of course is because it is an extremely relevant topic to me /s
Exactly this.
The only point i would add is the long ads that require an action to skip (30+ minutes).
More recently I have also been getting clear scams as ads and no amount of reporting can get rid of them.
These are the reasons I spent the time blocking the ads on all devices. Maybe Google should fix their ads to make them less awful instead of starting the death of Youtube.
Ad-blocking also gives you similar if not more extra security to anti-virus software, with fewer downsides (faster not slower). I'm afraid the ad ecosystem is so big that occasionally, threats slip through.
This may be true on random-site-X on the internet, but is not true on sites like YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, Facebook, etc that run their own first-party ad platforms.
Yet.
YouTubes "first-party ad platform" is delivering some of the worst ads on the whole internet.
It's not only the big-boobed characters promoting mobile games, there are (video) ads for pyramid and other "get rich quick" schemes, conspiracy theories (government will force everyone to become transgender!) and whatnot.
They don't give just the tiniest bit of a shit for all of this, as long as they are earning money with it.
I have heard of their “system”, they auction ad space out in real time with a bunch a descriptors for the ad buyers who then bid for the space. Google really doesn’t give a crap who wins it or if it matches your interests/needs. Advertisers are free to advertise to anyone as long as they win the bid.
Your security is not affected by you seeing bad ads.
>…there are (video) ads for pyramid and other "get rich quick" schemes…
Oh my dog. Before I set up Invidious to ensure my experience on iPad and such could be ad free, the one that really shocked me is one of the two ads that would show up mid-roll for a creator I watched regularly was SIXTY SIX MINUTES in length. Yes, an hour and six minutes! I can’t imagine what that must cost, but clearly whatever they were selling must cover the costs of a 66-minute ad well enough!
I've been wondering what the purpose of those super-long ads is for some time, but now it suddenly occurred to me: they're for unattended youtube players.
Plenty of shops, waiting rooms, lounges, bars, etc have a TV which is simply tuned to a youtube playlist. Whoever is issuing those ads is counting on that the operators of those TV's for whatever reason (either because they don't care, don't notice, or don't have access to the controls) don't skip them.
Not entirely. I sat through a 12 minute ad once. We could have skipped it after 5 seconds. But it was a charming video of a lady cooking a hamburger and I rather enjoyed watching it. I wish more ads were like that
Any chance you have the link to that ad?
I do not! It was years ago. And unfortunately there is no tracking of ads, I wanted a link to that video too. You can't even back up and re-watch an ad!
I've noticed that some people like to play YouTube videos to go to sleep, and YouTube will play those long ads at night.
I've seen it said that newsfeeds/ads/etc. feed you what they think you will engage with, so you may want to wonder why you're seeing that type of content. I've never seen anything of the sort on any large tech platform, and I'm probably in an appropriate demographic to be recommended that stuff.
Those algorithms tend to be "people who liked X also liked Y", which is very prone to false positives for people who don't fit conventional stereotypes.
For example, someone who watches the Forgotten Weapons channel on Youtube might get recommended far-right conspiracy videos, because people who like guns often like far-right politics. They might also get recommended Scott Manley and Greg's Airplanes and Automobiles because all three have deep dives into interesting historical technology.
Ideally, there would be more manual knobs for communicating one's preferences about such things to recommendation algorithms.
Relatedly, easily the highest item on my wishlist for YouTube features is algorithm customizability. Half the time I'm recommended the same 5 channels, while the other half I'm recommended amazing videos from fantastic smaller YouTube channels.
Being able to at least switch between some presets for the algorithm would be amazing.
I think it's more the lack of other analytics data, due to uBlock Origin and a PiHole in my network, that they fall back to those ads. Maybe I'd have some nice ads for cooking supplies if I were to allow tracking, not sure.
Facebook shows me mobile game ads that are basically soft core porn for games that have absolutely nothing to do with the content of their ads.
Cool, has nothing to do with security. That’s a different point entirely.
YouTube and its parent Google are known for being infested with ads linking to viruses and malware.
The most outlandish and obvious scam advertisements I have seen (by far) have all been on Instagram
Facebook ads have certainly been used to deliver malware in the recent past.
I almost fell for a scam yesterday from an instagram ad. There was an ad for fun printed workout shorts for only €4. I added a couple different prints and was about to pay when I noticed the URL was neehd dot com and the site title was some other random word. I couldn't find any reference to either name online and went back to instagram. The VERY NEXT AD was for an identical site with a different random 5 letter url. I reported both ads and now neehd com is "no longer available". Very glad I didn't put any payment details into the site. If they employ people to vet ads full time they should have easily been able to catch those ads before it was shown to a user. I have seen ads for those shorts non stop for a few weeks before I finally tapped the ad to see how much they were.
One of the ways I solve that is to never buy anything that's been advertised to me (unless I have information about it from other channels).
You not only clicked through an ad but were going to buy whatever it was trying to sell you? Wild!
YouTube? The website that had such a large advertising campaign for GTA 6 beta that people started doing meme videos about it?
Indeed. Some years ago a fairly well-known news site here in Norway had their ad platform hacked, and it started serving a payload that exploited a vulnerability to infect a machine visiting the site with zero user interaction and zero visibility.
The payload would then proceed to hijack the browser and intercept sessions to the most popular online bank, allowing it to redirect funds behind the scenes without alerting the user.
That's the point when I realized ad blockers aren't a nice-to-have, but an essential protection element.
Performance and security may be my primary reasons for using an ad-blocker, but I must also admit that I would not remove the blocker even if those issues were addressed. On the rare occasion that I have used a computer without an ad blocker, I have found that advertising is so intrusive that I would rather not use the web.
This is why I don't read news articles on my phone. It's absolutely ridiculous what publishers do with ads
I run a PiHole in the cloud and VPN into it from my phone. Does the job of blocking ads pretty damn well.
What often ends up happening though is there will be a big empty box where the ad is supposed to be. And it's outright appalling how many ads they try to shove onto your screen. Every paragraph is separated by an ad.
Firefox with uBlock Origin. I rarely see ads.
I've resolved that I just don't want to be advertised to. I will never stop blocking ads no matter what, even without the security benefits.
I see no ads.
> the vast majority of them quite the opposite of discrete.
This is the main point IMO. When you have a printed newspaper or magazine you are not annoyed by the ads.
If we had ads that (1) do not move, (2) are not modal/do not pop up, (3) do not track you outside the website, (4) do not take MB's of data I would be willing to tolerate them and they could even be helpful.
Youtube has become unwatchable without ad blockers. It used to be better than TV, now it is worse and you cannot skip them.
> I will not, and probably cannot, pay and subscribe to any random website I am gonna visit to remove ads to make the experience tolerable, when I can just block the ads.
Okay, but how do you square that with the fact that hosting content costs money? Are the people and companies which provide the content you look at not allowed to earn money to keep the servers running and the sysadmins fed?
Producing television shows also costs money, but no-one forces me to watch the ads there. I can change channel, or skip past them if recorded, or just leave the room while they're on.
Why can’t you do that with YouTube? Changing the channel is as easy as closing the tab and you certainly can leave the room or mute it during ads.
I would have no problem with ads if they weren't so obnoxious. They cause the page layout to shift as they load in, they block the loading of actual page content, they play sounds, play videos, pop up over the content i'm trying to read. Advertising doesn't have to be like that and that's why i block it.
If you rely on ad revenue and people do not enjoy using your product more than enduring your ads, maybe your business model is wrong to begin with?
then websites should be able to stop you from using ad blockers and presumably no one should throw a hissy fit about it, but thats not what happens.
Wdym? That's exactly what people do. If they can't look at a piece of content they close it and move on with their life.
and then they go on forums and act like they are being put in an internment camp because they cant block ads
they are sharing how they feel. you are not forced to read them.
How does this follow exactly? It sounds like a non sequitur.
By not caring about how any random website/app/whatever will survive, and only caring about the ones that add value to me.
I am not saying it makes total sense or is perfectly thought through, but I am asking myself for example, how would it be like if I never used/watched this service/app/creator/whatever ever again? Would I feel I lose something, would I care about it? I am not saying just finding some similar alternative, but about the experience itself regardless of alternatives.
Maybe others think differently, but for me, a vast majority of what I may watch on the internet is not really adding value to me and could just easily do without. To the ones that do add value, I support them, but in reasonable ways. If I do not feel it is reasonable, then I do not, and sad truth is that, for me at least, ads as implemented in most places create a bigger distraction than my incentive to support.
One example, I did not mind facebook's ads until facebook got over aggressive in sending me "suggestions" for various meme groups. It was unusable for me after that point. Then, I decided to use FB purity to get read of all ads and suggestions. If facebook had not done that, then I would have continued fine with its normal ads, one of the few ads that I have actually found useful was in facebook. But the alternative to removing the ads was not just seeing the ads after the change, the alternative was to stop using facebook (I have a very curated home page in facebook and unfollow 99% of my friends there) which is sadly not an option right now due to various social factors. Or maybe disabling the facebook feed itself somehow.
Another example is a supposedly private search engine. It had a banner to disable ads to support it, which I tried but then I just had to scroll down to see the first real results after the ads every time I was searching for something, which was non-sense and very annoying. I tried to find a way to donate or sth but there was no such option, so I gave up trying to support that. Maybe I move to another private search engine some point. I am not sure if I should just tolerate scrolling down to see the results everytime, but if there is a private search engine that uses ads in a better way I would be fine using that.
And as much as it is weird in our times, there are websites that do not depend on ads. For example I use bandcamp to buy the music I like, and with buying my music from there I support both the musicians and the website/service itself.
Other than that, I do subscribe/support/donate/buy services/apps etc that add value to me, even if I am not required to do so to use them freely and non-disruptively. I have even paid for games years after I actually played them through pirate versions, because before I did not have the money and I felt they deserved it. I guess if people do more or less something like that, according to each one's financial abilities, everybody will be happy or sth, and things that offer value to an adequate amount of people will be ok.
They are not entitled to profit from having captured the public square, no.
I think this is a silly framing, to be honest. Of course they're allowed to earn money, but they surely aren't entitled to that money.
On mobile YouTube right now I see two unskippable ads before every video. How long before some genius needs to juice his numbers this quarter and come up with the bright idea of three unskippable ads? Google made over $250 billion in 2021, $30 billion of that is thought to come from YouTube, can someone explain to me what is wrong with this status quo? If blocking a subset of users is such a good idea, why isn't Google rolling it out to everyone today?
To the bean counters who seem to have overwhelmed Google, losing a few users might seem like a dog losing some fleas. They are out of ideas for growth. Once blitz scaling has reached the limits of user acquisition the only play left to juice the numbers seems to be “boil the frog”, going to war with their Oort cloud of free users, pay up or else. Are the c-suite types at Google aware that this is exactly the mindset that will make their decline into irrelevance inevitable?
Elon Musk inadvertently turned Twitter into a howling wasteland in a few short months, which shows what happens when you boil the user frog too quickly. Imagine how Twitter would look today if Elon instead doubled down on making Twitter the best user experience, offering users tools to make Twitter more relevant, making it an unmissable service for users, and in turn unmissable for advertisers? But instead he pulled the lever all the way from utopia to hellscape, attempting to shake down users to restore some functionality to a clearly degraded product. Enshitifying (thanks Cory Doctorow) the user experience is not a compelling reason to subscribe.
Here's a radical idea: customer acquisition and retention by offering the most compelling product.
I'm not against advertising per se, I’m against being shaken down to regain a user experience that should be the default. Here are two examples of successful advertising models:
1. Lex Friedman does an ad read at the beginning of his podcast. It’s intentionally skippable, I skip it 90% of the time. But when I'm busy with bread dough on my hands or whatever, I'm still hearing the ads, which are mostly repeat offerings anyway. Advertising is not always appropriate, eg at a kids birthday party or showing a video in a lecture. The lesson: MAKE IT SKIPPABLE!
2. Inserts into shows / product placement, like on VFX Artists React. These seem harder for a behemoth to monetise but I like these because I know that the actual creators are getting paid. Youtube doesn't want to deal with creators with anything closer than a dashboard. This is not the end users fault, it’s not the content creators fault, it’s a symptom of absentee capitalism. Youtube should invest in creators and form true partnerships. The lesson: INVEST IN DEALING FAIRLY WITH HUMANS!
I’m not going to pay, I will continue to avoid ads but watch them occasionally. I’m going to keep playing the game of whack-a-mole finding software / hardware solutions. And when a competitor comes along with their slider set more towards user friendliness I’m going to jump ship.
> Google made over $250 billion in 2021, $30 billion of that is thought to come from YouTube, can someone explain to me what is wrong with this status quo?
YouTube might (but probably doesn't) make $30 billion in revenue. It certainly doesn't make $30 billion in profit. It's questionable if it even breaks even, and even if it does it's certainly nowhere near paid back the amount of money that has been spent keeping it afloat post acquisition.
> If blocking a subset of users is such a good idea, why isn't Google rolling it out to everyone today?
Because testing something is pretty much always a good idea.
> Here's a radical idea: customer acquisition and retention by offering the most compelling product.
That's not a radical idea, it's a bad one if you lose money on most customers and are hoping to make it up at scale. Ad blocking users are unquestionably money losers for Google.
> And when a competitor comes along with their slider set more towards user friendliness I’m going to jump ship.
What competitor do you think is coming that will be willing to (at a very conservative estimate) set fire to $75 billion+ for a decade to build this competitor, and the investors who loan that $75 billion dollars on a very risky ten year bet not expect a very significant ROI in exchange?
YouTube objectively should never have existed - it was extremely predatorily priced in terms of lowered ad load or subscription charging to actually exist as a business, and Google kept it going to scare competitors away. If a competitor actually comes it will be significantly, significantly more monetised than YouTube is.
> If blocking a subset of users is such a good idea, why isn't Google rolling it out to everyone today?
There's a bunch of reasons to do an experiment with a small percentage of users first, and to do a gradual rollout.
First, they don't actually know for sure that this works, since users are unpredictable. You need an experiment to see how they react now and in the longer term. Do all the impacted users just immediately switch to a different ad blocker that isn't getting detected? No point in rolling this out further until that is fixed. Do all of those users churn out entirely, rather than some of them disabling the adblocker or subscribing to Premium? Then there's a business decision to be made, and they didn't have data for it earlier.
Second, there might be technical issues that make the implementation harmful. For example maybe the JS code causes crashes for legit users on a browser you didn't test, or something. You'd like to contain the damage to just members of the experimental group, not all users of that browser.
Third, even if they know this will be a beneficial change, they don't know how beneficial. The people who proposed and implemented the project want to show the impact (an increase of X million in ads revenue, extra Y thousand Premium subscribers, Z reduction in serving costs, whatever their KPI is). The people who funded the team want to know whether they actually got a return on the investment, and whether they should continue staffing further work to improve coverage, etc.
> Here's a radical idea: customer acquisition and retention by offering the most compelling product
Isn’t that what they’re doing? This thread is full of people who are arguing that they cannot possibly be expected to stop watching YouTube, which sounds like they’re doing a good job attracting both an audience and compelling content. There’s a whole internet full of content out there, tons of options for creators to get paid, but even in a thread full of people saying they hate Google’s business model it seems like few people are willing to give up using YouTube so they must be doing something right.
You've hit on the reason I think the Brave token is such a great idea (https://brave.com/brave-rewards/). I know it's en vogue to trash gimmicky cryptocurrencies, and to be honest I don't care how this gets implemented. The concept is great: a shared, fungible way to easily support random websites one visits, and control the kinds of ads one accepts. If sites had a little tip jar which I could easily tap to avoid ads, I'd use it. There's just too much friction today in supporting sites, and all of them want a subscription.
The whole point of advertisements is that the person pushing them doesn't earn anything from them - but rather, force-feeds information about the existence of their product to the public. Now, instead of ruining our public space with horrible billboards and kitschy flashing lights, they ruin our digital space with horrible pop-ups and kitschy lust-provoking videos.
I don't care about those who run ads, nor those who allow ad companies to run ads on their content. If you earn money through ads, that's your problem, not mine, and it's not my responsibility to watch them. Ads are fundamentally intrusive, and pretending like the society at large has some kind of "responsibility" towards those who earn money from ads is laughable.
That was the original intention of HashCash, the inspiration to Bitcoin. Antispam micropayments to add some trivial level of cost to online interactions to make scale unaffordable.
This looks like a good idea indeed. I would not mind something like that, as long as some reasonable level of control from the user side exists. I will try it in my mobile as I use brave anyway there.
> The whole internet is bloated with ads right now
Internet? I think you mean everything. The whole everything is bloated with ads right now. Look around you, I bet you can see at least a dozen brand names without even leaving your chair.
People who work in marketing and ads should quit their jobs if they care at all about society, but of course they don't or they wouldn't be in marketing and advertising. Alternatively, we should just stop putting up with their bullshit because they have a long history of abusing every inch they are given.
And guess what, people pay extra for having some of these brand names on their shit. What a clown world.
Since I live in countries other than my own, there's a 0% chance that any given ad is relevant to me. Chances are it's in a language I don't speak or for a product I'm not eligible for, much less something I'd actually want.
This works out great because my brain doesn't get so distracted by ads, even physical billboard ads. But at the same time I use an ad-blocker to avoid wasted screen real estate.
I think the core issue is: * People don't like ads, because ads suck * Youtube offers premium, an ad-less experience
Never have I seen self-entitled people so furious as when YT requests they buy premium in order to remove ads. What, should YT be hosted for free without ads and without a subscription?
I get that ads suck and companies suck, but self-entitled people suck too; most of us here are devs and we get paid because our company has to make money _somehow_.
YT users have two great options for paying for their access, dealing with ads or paying a subscription. They refuse either option and instead are furious that YT doesn't offer itself completely for free.
I don't like ads and I don't mind paying. What I don't like is paying for an ad-free experience and my data continuing to get mined. I consider companies entitled if they demand to have both my data and my money
> YT users have two great options for paying for their access, dealing with ads or paying a subscription.
I wouldn't say it offers 2 great options. The ad-funded offering is a non-starter given the reality of its ad market. The paid option sounds great, but if the goal is to finance the creators you enjoy most, it doesn't work. The success of Nebula, plus several of YouTube's policy changes or lack thereof, imply that YouTube doesn't actually care, it's just driven by greed.
Don't forgot data mining is a very profitable industry.
Youtube is part of the reason I have an adblock. I do not watch youtube on my phone because of the ads.
Reasonable ads would be fine. 10-15 seconds of ad on a short video, 30 seconds on a longer one. A choice to watch a 3 minute ad to watch a 2 hour video uninterrupted. I kind of long for the banners of days gone by.
But that's not what is going on. They'll play an ad in the middle of a music video. ad after ad after ad. And I get ads in videos because they are "sponsored". It has been designed to be as intrusive as possible to try to extort you out of money. And honestly, I despite them for this. If they can't possibly let music play for 4 minutes without an interruption or two, they can't possibly care if I'm watching for "free" nor care about the folks making their content.
> What, should YT be hosted for free without ads and without a subscription?
Yes, same way you don't need a subscription to walk along a road.
I'm pretty sure thats called "taxes"
As another commenter said, roads are paid for with taxes, usually a special road tax collected from car-owning citizens, sometimes even from the specific area the road is in. I hope you pay your taxes.
What a ridiculous comparison, though. Like, really? If I were to use the same logic surely I could just walk into your own house and just live there free of charge. You cook my meals and clean up for me too, thanks. Oh wait, that's absurd.
wait till chatgpt folks realize how much the opportunity cost is of not monetizing their page views (yes, even for paid folks).
What people mean when they say all these things is that, "I can easily access things I want for free, so why would I ever pay?"
Yes some people give voluntarily through donations or Patreon, but it's a tiny amount of the actual number of people who derive satisfaction from the content.
The best solution for someone who hates ads is a subscription model. The thing that bothers me is that publishers still collect massive amounts of data and sell it, and some continue to have advertising or product placement. Give me ads or give me a completely untracked experience for a fee. Don't do something in between and claim that it's ad-free.
Any website that doesn't want me able to choose what I do on my own computer with the information they've freely given me is welcome to move to a different protocol that requires a locked down operating system that forces display of their content in the manner that they dictate. Until then, they can choose to stop freely sending me information or accept I'm going to use information on my own computer however I want (short of redistributing it).
When they try to add these protocols, though, everybody complaints a lot.
and? the changes are either worth it or they aren't. if they're not worth it then don't make them.
Bandcamp is interesting and I am considering it and cancel Spotify. How do you go about discovering music? I use Spotify for not only listening to my artists but for music discovery too.
Oof this is a great question, it actually deserves a thread of its own tbh. I do not think I have figured that out completely in a satisfactory way. Bandcamp is not that great at that as in providing a feed of songs suggested to you by your preferences, it does not have "autoplay", and searching for content in a more classic way there is messy. But it does provide a list of suggestions under each album, with a list of albums that a number of people who own that album also own, which is quite decent. It is particularly useful if what you want to find something that is similar to style to something you like. I find it quite reliable actually in finding similar stuff, probably because buying an album is quite strong measure to use to correlate albums.
Also, I find quite a few genre-specific compilations in bandcamp (and elsewhere), and this is probably my favourite way to discover new bands, because usually compilations include decent bands and some of their strongest tracks, so you do not get lost as much. And as far as internet is concerned, other places I find new inspiration are genre specific forums, pages etc, and actually pages/accounts of the bands themselves (they often suggest bands they themselves like - bandcamp has even an option for artists to recommend material from others to their audience, which is actually quite nice).
In general, I would say that discovering new music in bandcamp is possible, but it is rather an active process (you look into an album you like and browse through the suggested albums, play each of them etc) and takes time. In contrast, with dj youtube it is easier because it is predominantly passive, by automatically playing new suggested tracks and once in a while you hear sth that clicks. I admit that I have discovered some of my favourite bands through dj youtube this way. I have not used spotify but I assume it is somewhat similar?
Tbh I appreciate the active process, in the sense that I feel that the experience of the internet has become too passive, a very common experience is scrolling through lines, posts, pages of suggested content or letting one video play after the other, and everything is tailored/measured so that you scroll or watch more (and see more ads) being fed a constant stream of information typically with a very low signal to noise ratio. However, it is also nice sometimes to just relax and have an algorithm choose a next track because one has as much energy to spend in looking through stuff, and probably in music it works better than social media. I have not found something similar to that.
A side effect of ads (and something that ad blockers mask, giving websites a normal appearance) is that ad supported websites have the wrong incentive.
When you browse a website with no ads, you are the public. Content is provided for your use, and that's all.
When you visit an ad supported website, you are only the means to achieve an end, which is to have you in the site as much as possible, clicking on as much ads as possible. That usually had the effect of making the website content bloated.
Not all sites begin like that, but they all end like that. And ad blocking hides that ugly truth under a layer of normalcy.
I agree with that. However, it feels that ads are a waste of time, so I'd rather not disable it everytime I log into a website.
I do agree with you, though!
I have a massive collection of Mp3s and wav files on my phone... Have cultivated it for decades now. I rarely stream music because of ads and bandwidth throttling that my mobile data provider implements.
About 2 weeks ago, I heard Black Player (App), which already works in a very unexpectedly and illogically difficult and frustrating manner, started injecting ads into my normal music library. I may just need to charge up my old iPod from now on, it doesn't ever need weekly software updates for some strange reason like everything else.
Yeah I do similar, I actually use musicolet to listen to my offline music library (https://krosbits.in/musicolet), an android app that is just offline, no ads, no network permission at all, nothing. It does the job very well and it does not mine any data or show any ads. I highly recommend to give it a try (I assume you use android?).
And to add, while it is free and I could have continued just fine not paying anything to use it, I have paid for the "pro features" that I did not even need (apart from chromecast which I do not use, the other pro features were mainly aesthetic) just to support the developer for providing such a great app that respects my privacy and does not bloat my phone. People think that somehow those who do not want to pay to youtube just want to get everything for free. I have no issue with paying for any service that adds value to my life and respects my privacy, but youtube/google is not just that, and the fact that I use youtube for free does not mean that I would use it the same way if I had to pay for it or had to watch ads all the time. And to be honest, the fact that the app did not require me to support it in order to not send me ads or whatever, made me more incentivised to actually support it, because the incentive to support comes exactly from the appreciation of the experience it provides.
Maybe this sounds like an ad for that app, and it actually is so. I think that such pieces of software that really respect the privacy and provide an alternative to shameless streaming services like the one discussed here are worth being advertised by their happy users.
A good way to think about the tracking urls attached to majority of websites these days, is as many different cameras tracking each person as it enters buildings and stores, using face-recognition.
Thus it stores all the places you have been and with ML and AI create some sort of personal file, with all kinds of attributes. (the more the better)
uBlock and others block these cameras from seeing your face.
To me your view is just common sense. I find it bizarre how some people seem to be treating ad-blockers like the equivalent of stealing in the comments.
It is YouTube's right to prevent me from using their site if I use an ad-blocker just as much as it is my right to stop using their service altogether if they prevent me from using it with an ad-blocker.
I totally agree, even if I hate it. There are a lot of internet users out there who have this expectation that they are owed a certain level of access for free to these services. Those expectations aren't unfounded: most content on the internet has been, more or less, free to access. It was a good time, but surely we all knew that it couldn't last forever?
The era of ultra monetization we're being ushered into is new and obviously its going to create some discomfort.
But that doesn't change the reality that these expectations are totally irrational and unreasonable. We can argue that the information should be free, that content should be accessible, that the sharing and proliferation of information without barriers of entry benefit all of us in the short and long term. But those esoteric philosophies can't win a debate against a corporations desire or fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit.
Money is tight for everyone across the board, borrowed or not (except maybe for apple). Why wouldn't they amputate the minority of users who are only costing Youtube money? I can't think of a good argument against it, other than "I hate it".
People are enraged by Netflix cracking down on account sharing, people were enraged by article paywalls, and people are and will be enraged by Youtube blocking ad blockers.
Unlike Netflix and article paywalls, Youtube has no real viable competitor. I get why the NYT allows me to bypass their paywall with a browser extension: if they truly make it impossible for me to bypass the article, I'll be able to find some other website that has reposted or reworded it. I get why Netflix allows me to bypass their account sharing: if they make it impossible for me to view the content without paying, I can just torrent it.
But Youtube is uniquely different. The product there is not just the body of content but their ecosystem which contains essentially every video on the internet and all the connective tissue to traverse billions of minutes of video. I use an adblocker on Youtube, but if they lock me out of that option, I'll still use YouTube, because where else would I go? No where.
Maybe I won't go to Youtube as often, but they'll have effectively converted me from being an extremely active viewer getting a free ride to an infrequent semi-active viewer that generates revenue.
That brings an interesting question: Would people start torrenting YouTube if it becomes inaccessible without a subscription? YouTube is exploding with high-quality long-form content, maybe pirates will consider those kind of videos worthwhile to torrent? Maybe the creators themselves will consider it worthwhile to host them with their own subscriptions?
YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay (And I am not talking about too broke to pay cases). Serving an infinite video catalog is very expensive in terms of all resources (And yes Netflix is not comparable, unlike YouTube, Netflix can highly leverage cache boxes at ISPs). Vimeo is one alternative for video hosting, and HN is surely not gonna like that model (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28547578).
So what is the alternative? (Peer to Peer for streaming doesn't seem a reasonable alternative at any scale, since most people own phones and then laptops, and much fewer desktops).
people are paying for the content with patreon, bypassing YouTube entirely. Why cant YouTube figure out how to get that money people are clearly willing to part with?
Why blame the users for YouTube failure?
Patreon is also Pay-what-you-want, so whales can subsidize lower tiers, and folks can often pay less than $15 per month.
Because people get real mad if YouTube tries to collect the patron money themselves and obviously takes a cut. Aka memberships.
So? Patreon's taking a cut (but YouTube takes a bigger cut; a quick search indicates 30% vs 8%-12%). I'm fine with YouTube memberships in principle; if a creator that I support said "consider switching your support from Patreon to YouTube", I would. But there's no way I'm signing up for YouTube Premium.
The parent said youtube should be able to take money directly... and I pointed out they can. That's what's So. And I didn't say youtube premium, I said memberships. Tho if you have enough memberships premium makes more sense fiscally even tho it doesn't give the money to the creators as much.
I was responding to your assertion that people get mad because YouTube takes a cut. The alternative (Patreon) also takes a cut.
People are also mad at that but sometimes less so. It seems those indirections launder the grumpy since there's not one focused place to complain. YouTube takes more because they're doing more work. It's funny cause no one seems to think YouTube deserves any munny for their technological marve of long tail content sometimes.
Isn't YouTube already doing that with channel memberships? I think people can also pay to comment on live streams or something.. They're definitely already letting you support creators directly, while taking their cut of course.
Yup. The livestream version is a "super chat" (or "super sticker" is an option), but even regular videos can turn on "super thanks" which let viewers donate and leave a comment. In any case, youtube takes 30%, so many streamers try to push to a third party option that takes a much lower fee. And the "and leave a comment" turns people off that option I'm sure, it'd be nice if they made it optional and just let you pseudo-anonymously support someone's video. Most people won't realize you can delete the comment right after making it and the channel still gets your money (not sure if the channel can still see the comment contents if any/account that did it). There's also "gifted memberships" which like memberships themselves is another feature lifted directly from Twitch. Given youtube's catch-up stance (Twitch also makes it difficult to use adblock) it's not hard to call them "failing" at monetizing; there are many interesting A/B experiments that could be done that they are not doing. (I think gifted memberships is no longer an A/B test feature but standard by now... so they do them sometimes, but not enough.) Part of it is also probably just Google culture; if something is "only" going to net them a few million in profit, it's not worth doing.
The amount of people paying with patreon is just so so tiny compared to people watching YouTube in any country or city that I am not even sure what your point is.
> Why cant YouTube figure out how to get that money people are clearly willing to part with?
What does this even mean? I hope you are not suggesting in good faith that YouTube should grab money from other companies somehow? Money that was given to that company by people with specific expectations in mind.
What exactly is YouTube failure here? The patreon citation is just so irrelevant because of scale. Taking all of Patreon revenue would not cover YouTube hosting costs.
People on HN love to talk about patreon as an alternative to youtube premium because it is an easy way out. But if it was representative of real world actions, Patreon would be processing a lot lot more money.
> The amount of people paying with patreon is just so so ...
Interesting. What are your sources for that info? :)
Many Patreon creators allow you to see how many patrons they have.
The most popular Patreon creators have something like ~50,000 patrons.
Anyone able to pull in that many patrons is likely to have millions of viewers on YouTube.
The proportion of viewers that pay is tiny.
> Many Patreon creators allow you to see how many patrons they have.
Ahhh.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of that being optional either.
Many Patreon creators don't though, so it's kind of hard to tell. :/
That being said, I kind of wonder if the % of people paying creators is much different to the average % of people who pay for online services.
From (probably dodgy?) rough memory, that's something like 4% of users.
No idea how that works out when compared to $ from Youtube viewers though. :)
I think people are more willing to pay via Patreon because it directly funds the creators. The more YouTube takes, the less willing people are to pay.
What if they charged based on use up to $15 per month?
That would be a lot more tempting.
I have YT premium and it is easily the best money I spend most months. I'll just play devil's advocate. Maybe people are imagining a pay per view type of experience?
completely agree. ESPECIALLY if you have children. they can piggyback of your subscription and they wont get fed those horrendous adverts while they're searching for tutorial videos.
Its how the kids learn faster these days.. tutorial videos in small bites about specific subjects.
Agreed - YouTube Family, and all child accounts are covered.
Some of those ads were truly atrocious for a child to watch, especially - if you're in Australia - those for WorkSafe.
I don't like paying for premium, but at the same time I have been able to do things I never could have on my own, save tens of thousands of dollars in DIY projects, etc. My fear is they will raise the pricing and boil the frog.
Yep, of all my subscriptions, YTP will be the last to go. The experience truly is a premium one, only marred by the inability to disable YouTube shorts.
(I recently made near exactly the same comment in a recent, related story thread - but it's worth repeating).
Yes I too would love an option to disable shorts. Like hide it behind 50 buttons for all I care but please let me disable shorts.
Agreed. Also stop shoving news channels in my face. Every few weeks/months they come back, usually after some horrific event.
“Welcome to YouTube! Would you like to watch 40 videos on todays slaughter of innocent people?”
No. The answer is always no.
Every time a news channel comes up in recommendations, click the three dots menu on it and choose "do not recommend videos from this channel" (or w/e).
After a short while of doing this the supply of news channels starts drying up, though the algo occasionally attempts to push increasingly unlikely ones on you; just continue mopping them up.
Shorts is the digital content equivalent of cigarettes. I'd love an option to hide shorts forever.
YouTube is the digital content equivalent of cigarettes. Shorts is just a stronger form.
I disagree. There is a lot of good and information dense content on YouTube. Shorts as a format though mostly tends to be dopamine rich garbage.
For desktop there is a chrome extension, but no options for the app.
Ironically I'm removing shorts using u-Block origin.
Yes, I would happily pay more for the ability to remove shorts.
On Android, I disabled the YouTube app and use Firefox for YouTube, entirely because of the shorts. It lets you remove the shorts for 30 days in the browser. I did have to switch text messaging apps because the default option wouldn't work without YouTube enabled whenever someone sent a YouTube link.
It's indeed infuriating how these services try to cram TikTok style crap down our throats.
The stupid thing is: they try to get more popular than TikTok. How the hell do they expect to become popular with users that don't want this stuff? I'm not on TikTok, I hate YouTube shorts and Instagram reels. Just allow me to turn that shit off and I'll be a lot happier and use the service more because it's not pushing me away.
How do they think forcing it on unwilling users is in any way beneficial??
Thanks, I'll have a look into that!
My biggest beef with Shorts is that it's the equivalent of having the shelves full of lollies and junk food if you're trying to be healthy; it's far better not to have any available if you want to stay lean.
I love long form YouTube videos as much as I loathe the short form, whose promotional algorithms are skewed towards content that's rubbish for the brain - and society.
Edit: On Samsung Internet, could browse to the mobile app and indeed hide the shorts for 30 days (little X in top right of Shorts content panel, not a setting). Furthermore, if I disable "open links in apps" under settings/useful features, I now get the YouTube icon to open the current video in the app - this lets me browse for videos without being bugged by Shorts, and I can then open in the app if I want some of its features such as play in background etc. Thanks again, great tip.
The one thing I don’t like is incognito mode in the YT app disables YT Premium.
From time to time I turn it in to look something up quick. Maybe a recipe or something. A topic I don’t want recommended to me constantly for the next few weeks.
But it also turns all ads back on. Instead you can watch it normally and remove it from your history, but I’m not sure that works.
Ok, work with me here… It’s incognito mode, the mode created such that it explicitly doesn’t carry over cookies from regular mode, or between sessions.
What exactly are folks expecting here? Google to break out of the explicitly requested sandbox?
You don’t have to be snarky.
I want the app to keep a single boolean flag in memory: user is authorized to not see ads.
They don’t need to know who I am, just that I don’t need to see ads.
That seems imminently doable.
Yes, they do. YouTube distributes your premium funds to creators by watch time. If they can’t associate your views with your subscription, they can’t compensate creators fairly.
Not to mention, it’s imminently not possible. Not without poking holes in what is and is not shared between regular and incognito mode (across 5+ browsers owned by different businesses, no less). And breaking this barrier would earn Google a ton of backlash, and rightfully so.
> across 5+ browsers owned by different businesses, no less
I don’t care about that. I agree this would be impossible in the browser.
I’m talking about the official app specifically, they should be able to do it there.
Premium funds is a good point I hadn’t thought of. I’d be fine if that didn’t happen while in incognito. Treat me like incognito mode for any other random user, just without ads.
I don’t run it all the time. And I wouldn’t if they did this. It’s extremely rare I want to do this.
But if I look up a recipe I’m likely to be bombarded with cooking channels. Home DIY fix? Similar. God forbid I look up a news video on a current event.
Huh? How will they know whether to set that bit if they don't know who you are?
They knew before I turned on incognito in the YT app. I just don’t want that one bit erased.
I dislike YouTube as much as the next person, but do you understand how unreasonable of an ask this is when you are explicitly going into incognito mode? I echo everyone else's sentiment here.
I don't know why everyone is fixated on the term incognito. I believe what GP wants (and me too) is to pause watching history or to at least exclude a viewing session from the recommendation algorithm.
Let's discuss this feature some more?
The reason users such as yourself want this feature is because you don't have faith in the recommendation algorithm, right? If you watched a video and Google started pushing related videos that you don't want to constantly see, and you clicked on the "do not recommend this kind of video" option, and it actually worked, would you be satifised without this "exclude from recommendation algorithm" mode?
If yes, the better solution here would be to have a recommendation system that isn't garbage. I admit I kind of fancy this described mode, but the only reason is I don't currently trust Google to actually respect my expressed discontent. And if we don't trust Google to have a faithful recommendation system, why would we be willing to trust YouTube Premium?
If that bit is a literal bit, there will be an extension that just sets that bit, thereby bypassing ads when you didn't actually pay a subscription.
If that bit is some sort of encoded identifier that an extension couldn't generate, then they will know who you are.
Same here, live YouTube premium but hate shorts. I’ve even reached out to Google to have an option to disable (which I know won’t go anywhere but )
+1 on this. YT premium is easily worth 4x its price, it's an amazing deal. It's the largest media catalog in the world, and unlimited ad-free access for $12 is a steal. There is no digital subscription that comes close in value.
Question, how do content creators get paid if the platform has no ads? I thought they get paid when I watch an ad, and even more if I engage with those ads? In fact, I maliciously (is this the right word) clicked on scam ads (youtube sends me lots of those).
And is it really worth 4x its price? I mean its just ads getting removed. I can tolerate ads easily.
YouTube Premium pays content creators based on the amount of time that Premium subscribers watch their content.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276?hl=en#zipp...
From what I've seen creators say, they get more revenue from a Premium user than they would have if the user had just watched some ads.
I’m curious about the potential for adverse effects. Let’s say I pay YT $12/mo and Google keeps $3 for their costs. If I watch 1 video that month does that creator get $9? Does the creator get 5c per view from me regardless and some subscribers subsidize others?
I wish there was more transparency around what my money is actually buying.
Google shares a portion of their YT premium revenue with creators. In general a view from a YT premium user will earn a creator more money than a view from someone using YT for free and viewing ads.
(But any info I can find seems anecdotal, I don't think youtube publishes any numbers -- and earnings will depend on where in the world those viewers are, etc...)
They're paid with the subscription money based on how many members watch! If you only watch a small number of videos or don't mind ads then it might not be worth 4x for you. However I personally find advertising deeply disturbing and am willing to do whatever it takes to be free of it.
I agree. I love YT Premium and I think it’s worth it for the amount I watch YT.
But almost everyone I ask thinks it’s a “scam”. The more technical the user, the more likely they are say something like “why should I have to pay when I have an add blocker”.
Like so many thing, there is almost a sense of entitlement to free content with clickable ads, which doesn’t bode well for the future.
The others either are willing to put up with the ads or think the price is much too high for the value of not seeing ads even if they watch tons of content.
I pay because I want to support the channels I watch and at this point the YT ads are just infuriating to me.
I also pay for YT Premium, but I have a gigantic complaint that it doesn't actually make YouTube completely ad-free. There are still the ads that the content produces insert themselves.
I'm not blaming the creators. I get it. They aren't making enough money from YouTube to avoid having to do their own promotions. But that means that YouTube is not giving me what I'm paying for. I'm paying for an ad-free experience and--because YouTube doesn't use my money to compensate creators well--I'm not getting and ad-free experience.
You can use sponsorblock. But yeah you shouldn't have to.
This could be fixed. Some creators have already split their sponsor blocks out into video chapters, making it very easy to skip. YouTube could mandate that content creators mark their sponsor pitches and both A) automatically skip it for paying users, and B) prevent skipping it for free users.
True, but I doubt they will do this because it evades their 30% take on ad revenue.
Yeah, YouTube premium is one of those rare subscriptions that as soon as it lapses I immediately resubscribe. The value for the money is just too good.
Yes, me too. YouTube leads in my unregretted minutes, and I don’t want to watch ads when deciding what to watch.
YouTube has caching like that too, see:
https://peering.google.com/#/
And
https://peering.google.com/#/learn-more/faq
And specifically the section on: "What content can Google serve from an edge node?"
This is not comparable to Netflix et al. YouTube catalog is effectively infinite, and people watch all kinds of random content. Storing 10k movies and 20k TV episodes is a cakewalk compared to this.
I don't disagree that YouTube has a much longer (and fatter) tail, but that doesn't mean they can't benefit from edge caching.
They can benefit for sure, my point is that serving a YouTube type catalog is just far more expensive.
There's undoubtably more data being served but I'd be very curious how the edge caching efficiencies differ given how many people watch the same things (recommended by the algorithm) and since YouTube's content is so much shorter on average that larger catalog is somewhat balanced by any given cache node being able to hold more videos.
The cache hit rate is actually pretty high. Also, google already has setups at pops for other reasons and can cache fill at lower qos for free much of the time.
> YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay
There's also a factor of quality and trust. I don't trust YouTube Premium enough to even try it. This is mostly colored by their constant, invasive disruption of my YouTube experience (particularly apparent on mobile) with YT Premium ads. Yes, I know it exist. No, I don't want it - the more you try to trick me into activating the trial, the less I want it.
> So what is the alternative? (Peer to Peer for streaming doesn't seem a reasonable alternative at any scale, since most people own phones and then laptops, and much fewer desktops).
Proper ad blocker on the desktop. yt-dlp for archiving/off-line playing. NewPipe or some other alternative YouTube players for mobile.
Yes, I know you meant a non-free-riding alternative, but hey - I have no problem paying for services, even for premium tiers when free tier is available. But I'm not getting bullied into subscribing.
I've been a subscriber ever since Google Play Music bundled it in, and it's fine. Sorry to hear you're getting bullied, but the paid experience really is rather nice.
> I have no problem paying for services, even for premium tiers when free tier is available.
> I don't trust YouTube Premium enough to even try it.
These two statements seem to be mutually incompatible unless you're trying to argue that a premium tier doesn't really exist unless you can write the terms of service and audit the company providing it. It's also somewhat hard to follow the logic here: if you don't trust YouTube, why are you watching them at all? It's not like Google tracks you less that way and if you're under the impression that your ad blocker is helping there you can certainly subscribe to Premium while leaving the same blocker enabled.
I like premium stake and would pay for it. I'm not eating premium stake at Cockroach Joe. His sandwiches are alright.
How are they incompatible?
People will make all sort of excuses to rationalize not paying for digital content that they can easily get for free.
Funny part is. I actually got YT premium from family member. It's indistinguishable from using adblock.
I don't make any excuses-- if the content is handed to me for free, I take it. They also hand me ads for free but I don't care for those, thanks.
It's really a strange concept that we're somehow cheating someone for not looking at an ad. And yet somehow it wouldn't be cheating if we poured over every ad but never bought anything in them.
But you are cheating someone. The creators of the videos you're watching don't get anything when you block the ads. That means you've cheated them of money, on top of cheating the company of money.
It's not handed to you for free, there's an implicit condition that you watch the content and the ads that are served with it. Too many people don't do that and that's why YouTube is now testing blocking ad-blockers. You reap what you sow.
>It's not handed to you for free, there's an implicit condition that you watch the content and the ads that are served with it.
No, there isn't. The web was designed from the beginning to allow the end user to have control over what content is and is not displayed. It isn't television, radio or magazines, the platform owner doesn't have complete control over the layout and display of the content they serve. There is no condition, implicit or otherwise, that the end user will pretend they're consuming an old media product just because web platforms can't move beyond old media models of revenue.
None of which require viewing, reading or listening to the ads, either. Ads have always been a gentleman's agreement.
>Too many people don't do that and that's why YouTube is now testing blocking ad-blockers. You reap what you sow.
No, Youtube is going to reap what it sowed, because no one is going to turn off their ad blockers. If their platform was worth paying for, everyone would have moved to the paid tier by now. Google bought a free video service and tried and failed to monetize it to the point of nearly ruining it for content creators with their puritanical rules, arbitrary demonitization, opaque to nonexistent support and restrictive algorithm, but no matter how much they squeeze the turnip, it won't bleed enough for them.
That's not our problem. We'll gladly support content creators directly through Patreon or other means, but Google can get fucked.
Which brings us right back to the article: don't be surprised when your ad-blocker stops working.
Serving high bitrate video is not cheap and YouTube is notoriously breaking even at best. Any alternative is going to be even less efficient and more expensive due to the lack of economies of scale that Google has. If that's what you want so long as it doesn't have Google's name in the corner, so be it, that's understandable.
>If their platform was worth paying for, everyone would have moved to the paid tier by now.
I disagree. I think people are inherently cheap and will exhaust other options of getting the same content for free first. We shall see I guess.
> don't be surprised when your ad-blocker stops working
Yes, it's an arms race, always has been. But it's more expensive for them to break the ad blockers than it will be for the ad blockers to inevitably update, so if it's a war of attrition, they will still inevitably lose.
The problem isn't that people aren't watching the ads, the problem is Google's business model doesn't work, not for Google, not for the consumer and certainly not for content creators, and the only solution they can come up with is trying to force people to watch ads - which never works.
>Any alternative is going to be even less efficient and more expensive due to the lack of economies of scale that Google has.
I mean, plenty of alternatives already exist, and content creators are starting to lead viewers to those alternatives, because of Youtube's arbitrary censorship and demonetization. Every social media platform hosts video now. There are decentralized platforms like Peertube. We're way past the point where "streaming video" is a hard problem that only Google-scale infrastructure can solve.
They're going to have to innovate or die like any other company, and disabuse themselves of the illusion that the web is a gravy train where the rules of supply and demand don't apply. This isn't innovation, this is desperation.
Which alternatives host and stream up to 4K@60 HDR videos for free/ads only?
I don't know, but given the choice of watching slightly lower quality videos (which probably look the same on their phones anyway) and paying for a free service, most people will prefer lower quality videos.
If I were to allow all ads but make it a rule to never actually watch them or heaven forbid, buy anything in them, would that be ok? I'm sure it would be ok with the content provider, because then they get their money and that's all that counts.
If I can't watch it without ads, I simply won't watch it. And I certainly won't pay for it if it still includes ads.
>If I were to allow all ads but make it a rule to never actually watch them or heaven forbid, buy anything in them, would that be ok?
Yes, you would be holding up your end of the agreement.
>If I can't watch it without ads, I simply won't watch it. And I certainly won't pay for it if it still includes ads.
Buy YouTube Premium and you won't get any ads and the content creators you watch will get more money than if an ad had played instead. Win-win.
I don't remember ever seeing an agreement. I'm not a subscriber.
But it's interesting that you'd have no problem with me never buying anything in the ads. What's the purpose of them again?
the purpose of an advertisement is to give advertisement companies something to sell to product makers, and to give product makers something to have media companies put in front of viewers in exchange for money.
it's a whole economy unto itself. money changing hands, jobs, all of it. almost no one buys something because they saw an ad for it.
Your use of the service is governed by the terms[0], which say "You are not allowed to:... alter, modify or otherwise use any part of the Service or any Content...". Even if you've never signed up for a Google account, it's implicit that YouTube doesn't actually serve anything for free, every video view and page load is a transaction for "youtube serves me content and I pay for it by having screen real estate taken up by ads". They do not have to serve the content if they think you aren't upholding your end of the bargain, which is this ad blocker block.
0: https://www.youtube.com/t/terms#c3e2907ca8
I am sorry, but the internet right now is bloated with ads that slow down everything and create an absolute distraction when one tries to browse, I do not care if they have problem modifying the appearance and behaviour of a webpage that I have loaded on my browser, but this goes to anything in the internet basically. I am not gonna compromise myself before they all fix the internet of the mess they have created.
I pay for the content that I think it is worth supporting, and that's it. I do not think youtube is worth supporting, and if quite often the only reason I watch things there instead of somewhere else is due to laziness. Same for many creators I follow probably. If they set adblock restrictions I will just stop watching and that's it.
What about all the YouTube videos where ads are part of the program? If YT Premium could block those too, I might subscribe.
SponsorBlock to the rescue
This is the same argument people make about piracy. About potential revenue. The fact of the matter is, if I couldn't watch the video without either watching ads or paying for premium, I wouldn't watch it at all. So, the creator gets no money either way. Same thing when I pirate software or a movie or a game. I wouldn't have paid for it anyway, so the amount of money the creator gets is the same, zero.
So don't watch it then. Serving video is not cheap and you're increasing costs for everyone else. I don't get to jump the fence at a music festival just because I wouldn't have gone if I had to pay.
yep. there's a word for a creature that consumes without contributing anything back, making things harder for everyone else: "parasite."
Alphabet has plenty of money. So long as I'm capable of watching Youtube for free with adblock on, I will continue to do so and feel no guilt.
And thus YouTube is experimenting with an ad-blocker detection mechanism.
And this is exactly why YouTube should block ad blockers, to force people like you to be honest.
I fail to see how I'm being dishonest. It's not like I'm lying about how I use it.
Today you get to learn that words can have multiple definitions!
That kinda sounds like lying.
I'd gladly watch the content somewhere else if Google wasn't holding a monopoly over it.
Good news, they aren’t. Tons of content is on multiple services - if you really have a principled objection to Google, you should show that by supporting those services rather than boosting YouTube’s popularity.
"Tons of content on multiple services" =/= "Tons of alternative services"
There is only one viable alternative to Youtube that I'm aware of. I use it whenever I can, but that doesn't change the fact that Youtube holds a monopoly.
The videos are usually sponsored with the ads pushed by the streamer themselves. They’re getting paid just fine. YouTube freely steals my data so they’re doing just fine. I’m just being gaslit into thinking I’m a thief.
How does YouTube steal your data? What do they do with it?
They track and sell it to undisclosed 3rd parties
Citation needed. No they don't.
Of course they do.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-...
https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-US
> Parties with whom information may be disclosed: Service providers, trusted businesses or persons that process information on Google’s behalf
If you were actually worried about YouTube stealing your data, why do you keep giving it to them by using their service? Wouldn’t the smart move be to stop visiting?
It's a simple value estimate. Some things, at least in the moment, appear to be worth having some of your data stolen. Also there are measures that can be taken, such as using adblockers, that minimize the cost.
How is data being “stolen”? All of the data they collect is data which you are freely giving them by using their service, and ad blockers really don't prevent any of that: you're connecting to a Google server telling them where you live, what type of device you use, and what you're interested in. An ad blocker prevents you from seeing ads but it doesn't do anything to prevent resale of the data you volunteer.
> How is data being “stolen”?
You tell me, I was responding to your hypothetical question: "If you were actually worried about YouTube stealing your data, why do you keep giving it to them by using their service?"
>An ad blocker prevents you from seeing ads but it doesn't do anything to prevent resale of the data you volunteer
True. That's why I still volunteer as little data as possible.
The creators wouldn't get anything either if I didn't block the ads, because I don't click on ads.
That's not how any of this works.
Anti-piracy folks love to use bullshit loaded terms (such as "piracy" itself) to justify some megacorporation taking over shit on my computer. Adblocking is now "cheating"?`
Speaking of loaded terms, what are they “taking over” by showing an ad along with the content? If you truly believed they posed the risk that incorrect terminology implies, why on earth would you continue using the site and giving them more opportunities to do so?
> His sandwiches are alright "when I don't have to pay for them"
fixed it for you.
That's a lazy rationalization which doesn't even make sense — either way you're getting the exact same sandwich, it's just a question of whether you pay for it directly or by watching ads.
This also doesn't make any sense from the negative way you're describing it: you're eating at Cockroach Joe's every day so clearly you don't really believe the food is bad. If you're using YouTube now, any negative which you can possibly imagine is already happening: they're tracking what you watch and where you watch it from, they're telling advertisers what kind of devices you use as a proxy for your likely spending habits, etc. There's a 0% chance they do that less when it's their only option to make money to cover your usage costs!
> That's a lazy rationalization which doesn't even make sense — either way you're getting the exact same sandwich, it's just a question of whether you pay for it directly or by watching ads.
It's an imperfect analogy. But point remains. Some places can offer bad and good experiences side by side, and have a long reputation of shitting up a few good products over time.
> eating at Cockroach Joe's every day so clearly you don't really believe the food is bad.
No. I know some X is bad, and some Y is good. It doesn't mean I hate X, I hate X that such and such makes.
It's like that scene in Spaceballs. Don't order the menu special.
If you think it’s a bad experience, why do you keep going? The fact that you’re concerned about avoiding ads means you must find the content interesting and that means you should pay for what you use, either directly or indirectly.
Because it is designed for addiction? Is that up for debate? YouTube is top result because it is owned by Google. This is a standard business model.
People bet into slot machines. Put an entry fee into a room full of slot machines and see for yourself how many people come to play.
The only way for a casino to make sure people pay to play a slot machines is to keep a free entry option that is gets annoying quickly. It is creation of a problem to justify a paid solution. Ad blockers solve that problem for free and have to be blocked.
And people who are addicted to slot machines have their own favorite games that they play all day long. They might pay at a chance to play. Youtube doesn't actually want to have a competitor at the same time.
If you actually believe that you should be blocking YouTube, not just the ads. The excuses in this thread are like arguing that it’s okay to sneak into a casino’s free buffet because the gambling industry has plenty of money and is bad for people.
Problem is, if you want videos Youtube is most likely your only option. TikTok hosts only 5min snippets, it's better (or worse) at addiction explotation. Vimeo doesn't host videos you probably want. Nebula (and other subsrcibe services) are great but what if I want a conference talks?
To torture the analogy. This isn't sneaking in the free buffet. It's the option of only free buffet in casino offering stuff you aren't allergic to. But then forcing you to play some strip poker to get in. Sure you can pay to get in, but what guarantees I have they won't force gambling on paying customers or further deterioration of the free experience?
In other words, YouTube is giving you something you value but you don’t to follow the terms of the agreement. Just be honest and say that rather than trying to invent these weird narratives to try to make it sound more noble than freeloading.
"In other words" why not address their actual words? Youtube is giving us something we value, but that does not justify any given demand Youtube comes up with. There's nothing noble about blindly accepting the terms of a monopoly.
YouTube is not a monopoly and you can easily live a perfectly happy, normal life not using it if you hate ads that intensely or, since you clearly like it quite a bit and are not willing to consider alternatives, pay 1-2 coffees per month.
Since you took the liberty to replace slot machines with "casino's free buffet" - an especially disingenuous misrepresentation - I mean do you want to say that people go to casino for food, and when I specifically avoided using the word casino... Can I go ahead and say that you all are acting like addicts being called out? I mean, did I use say we should block YouTube?
Talk about the "lengths" people go to defend their addiction. This is my general impression of the lot here on HN. You guys are so deep into cult of bullshitting that normal argument feels like an attack and invites downvotes.
Many things can cause you to go to same place. Lack of meaningful choice, not being able to afford anything better, etc.
But YT premium on itself is bad value. I can replicate most of its value with... An ad blocker.
Why should I pay Google to solve problems it creates for me? That's just incentives them making more problems. Maybe they will add a solve a captcha every 5 min if not on Premium.
And lastly YT isn't above ruining it as well (see premium ads). History (see cable) teaches us, ads on premium is a matter of time.
Hello my honey hello my ragtime gal.
This guy Spaceballs.
Would you pay for a $60 steak at McDonald's? Without reviews, seeing it, etc?
- You can try premium
- It is not $60 steak equivalent. More like it is the price of McDonalds burger itself.
- It is not an untested product. You are getting an option to pay for the burger and eat it, rather than watch a 30 min ad to eat it for free.
People will hate Google/FB ad model and at the same time also not pay for a paid tier that removes the ads.
YouTube Premium is my most loved subscription, for what it's worth. I don't even use the Music element, but if I did that would be another reason. While all other subscriptions I pause on and off waiting for content, YouTube has always had solid stuff -- from mindless good stuff, content reviews, learning household chores, to full-on lectures/talks from Universities/Conferences.
If you're getting served McDonalds at the world's largest buffet, it's because that is what you enjoy.
Where are you getting steak from? YouTube premium is the exact same content you like only paid for directly instead of by advertisers. You must already be watching stuff on YouTube and enjoying it because otherwise you wouldn’t care about whether it has ads.
> I'll eat at Cockroach Joe, but I won't pay. I also like to tell people I don't pay because it goes against my virtues. But I'll still go there to eat.
Fixed.
Even if I paid for YT premium, the money wouldn't go to the YT creator people I support.
It's really that simple. I can no longer trust PayPal, and Patreon doesn't accept my local credit card so that goes down the drain too.
They already harvest my data. I refuse to pay them money to exploit me further.
YT premium money does partially go to creators though??
Only to those that have a signed contract with YT, no?
Isn't that a really low bar though? If you're making any money off YouTube you've signed a contract. YT Premium just lets you make more.
To my understanding, the money primarily goes to large creators first. So the smaller creators get a smaller contribution out of my YT Premium.
So, if I really do want to support the creator, other external systems are better.
No, YTP money is paid to creators based on time YTP subscribers spend watching their content. So if you watch small channels that's who will benefit from your subscription.
The money mostly goes to large creators simply because those large creators have way more viewing hours.
The nice thing about YT Premium is that you have a single subscription to manage, and it then helps support a wide number of creators, even ones who you only see a single video of. It'll go to helping way more people in total than you would ever get around to signing up for individual Patreon subscriptions for.
See the replies to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35896620
What data do they harvest and what do they do with it?
The fact that we have to ask questions like this is indicative of google being a bad actor in this exchange. How much are they paying me for the data they steal?
They’re not stealing any data. You’re voluntarily giving it to them and if you don’t like the terms of the deal it’s trivially easy to stop by not going to YouTube.
Looking at your posts here, to me it seems like you are actively searching for reasons not to pay. Like you’re trying to justify some sort of cognitive dissonance you have on the matter.
Either pay up or admit (to yourself, us, whatever) that you’re not willing to pay for services you can get in an ad-supported format instead.
Is that really so hard?
My "posts"? As in two?
I only started getting a proper income recently. How exactly was I supposed to pay when my YT Premium used to be 5% of my income?
I already pay for Spotify and Amazon Prime. I literally don't have more disposable income. (Unless I throw in the emergency cash reserve or investments) I still have to pay for dental surgery and an optometrist.
What is it with people like you telling us to "admit" some deep seated desire? Is it so hard to not assume things about my life and create your own fantasy?
When I heard how much more a YouTube Red view was worth to a creator than an ad impression, I was convinced that it's a reasonable compromise.
I don't necessarily trust Google, but creators are vetting that Google is holding up their end of the bargain. So why shouldn't I?
In terms of Google holding up their end of the bargain, the reason you shouldn't trust them is simple: it is the CEO and board's fiduciary duty to the shareholders to make the most of Google's immense market power. The legal requirements governing their behaviour are such that they have to ensure that of all the participants in a transaction, they win biggest and most often.
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiduciary
So you shouldn't pay at a grocery store also? At any other big company shop? Because as you said so eloquently:
"The reason you shouldn't trust them is simple: it is the CEO and board's fiduciary duty to the shareholders to make the most of any company's immense market power. The legal requirements governing their behaviour are such that they have to ensure that of all the participants in a transaction, they win biggest and most often."
Dunno about you but the (only) local grocery store in the small W.Australian town where I live is owned in majority by the local community who hold shares and see the books - the employees and store manager (all locals) get paid well and money is set aside for growth and infrastructure investment after which everything goes back to keeping prices low and supporting local farmers | business.
That sounds lovely and idyllic - things like that rock and there should be more of them.
There's a lot of that here, it's a large state (3x size of Texas) with a low population (not much over 2 million) so a great deal of infrastructure is "socialised" from pooled money.
Grain pools for farmers, state electricity, education structured to reach all, etc.
It's a hybrid economy with elected representatives expected to represent those that elected them - and hasn't quite broken with scale yet.
We've also pooled a lot of the CDN mirrors that serve an isolated state with enough local oversight to be sure many internet services ride over any disconnects from cables being ripped up.
I'm in favour of locally robust networks - internet, food, reources, etc.
Grocery stores don't have a monopoly on selling food, so they can't arbitrarily raise prices.
When Alphabet stops holding up their end of the bargain, I'll stop paying them money. A pretty standard business/customer relationship.
> The legal requirements governing their behaviour are such that they have to ensure that of all the participants in a transaction, they win biggest and most often.
This always makes me laugh. They may be the minority, but public companies like Costco and Target who prioritize employees and company longevity do exist.
>public companies like Costco and Target who prioritize employees and company longevity do exist.
I spent a few years working at Target and a few at a Walmart. I'd take the Walmart every day of the week, though of course some of this is the particular people in charge at the store level, etc. I found Target to treat its employees pretty terribly in comparison.
Respectfully, this anecdote does nothing to refute the point.
There are an uncountable number of variables which could have resulted in your experience that have nothing to do with Target's (or Walmart's) high level corporate strategies.
That said, I am sorry that it was your experience. Working for bad bosses sucks big time.
There’s also a bit of a big fish in a small pond that can happen - a normal target employee may very well be an absolutely top tier Walmart employee - and being too tier is always nice.
They don't have to short term maximize. They can totally decide that they want to maximize their position 100 years from now by making less money crowding out competitors and all shareholders can do is sell the stock.
Heck, just yesterday, the Delaware courts ruled that it was okay for Jack Dorsey to spend $306MM of shareholder money so he could drink with Jay-Z. (It was to buy Tidal, but Tidal was obviously a bad purchase).
This is a very naive take on that duty. Executives have enormous leeway in deciding what is best for their shareholders. The idea that they are bound to every lousy "makes a penny today damn the consequences" decision put in front of them is absurd.
Do business lie for money? Sure. But fiduciary duties don't compel that behavior.
Dang. Could've fooled me!
It is a myth that fiduciary duty means maximising profit above all else. Let's see what that wiki page says:
Under Delaware law, fiduciary duty splits into 3 parts: the duty of care, the duty of loyalty and the duty of good faith. Fiduciary duty to shareholders means being a faithful representative of their interests, not putting your own personal interests first, exercising care and good judgement. It absolutely does not mean maximising profits above ethics.
FWIW, I've had it for years and it's great. I've basically forgotten YouTube has ads.
So have I because of invidious[1].
[1]: https://docs.invidious.io/instances/
That’s a shame that they’re apparently a bit pushy (I have Premium so don’t see any of that), because it’s been 100% worth it in my experience. I feel I get more than enough value from YouTube Premium to have it for myself, whereas Netflix I would cancel if I didn’t share it with my parents and two siblings. If they crack down on password sharing, it will go and YT will stay…
I pay exactly $0 and see no YT ads, and I am a pretty heavy YT viewer. I just don't think it's right to have to pay.
Advertisers use their dollars to influence and make statements, also forcing stupid age restrictions just because someone swears.
It's 1984 in 2023.
> I just don't think it's right to have to pay.
What makes you think it's right to be entitled to a free service?
You don't want to pay.
You don't want ads.
So ... then what?
Who said anything about "entitled"? Folks are ALL OVER this thread using emotionally-loaded language, because it's hard to argue for ads any other way.
I'm not argueing "for ads". The previous poster doesn't want ads, doesn't want to pay, okay, so then what? Offer an alternative please.
The people who want the content most could pay the content creators. These creators would pay for video hosting in the same way they already pay for their hardware and software.
This way, you wouldn't have to pay (which is what the parent comment wants). But you would still have an incentive to pay, because if not enough people did, the content you liked might might not get made.
So in essence, someone else should pay. Just not me. Real solid plan
I don't know if you knew YT around 2011 but the content was so much better.
People posted out of passion, because there was no money. It was an intrinsic filtering to weed out profit seeking.
I don't like the idea of creators getting paid, generally speaking. Information should be free.
I don't see any difference between rent seeking and YT click bait regurgitating existing knowledge that's easily accessible
Really?
Something has to pay for the infra costs.
Either tax money, ads or subscription fees. Choose one
Donations would also work, but being a publicly-traded for-profit company sort of precludes that, practically.
Youtube Premium is effectively a donation, frankly.
It's not in the legal sense, you do get a "product" for it. But it didn't take me long to realize that even paying for Youtube Premium, I was better off not logging into my account and just using NewPipe.
I really think the only reason to pay for Premium is if you want to donate money to Youtube.
I'll choose piracy, adblocking and freeloading.
It saves me money for actual physical goods.
So... Which do YOU want to pay? I'll choose to escalate the ad-adblocker-block adblocker war. Winning so far.
I think what people want is for the old system to continue (similarly to the Netflix password sharing crackdown saga) - youtube pushes ads for people who don't adblock, some pay for premium, and the others are free from ads due to their exceptional skills of browser addon installation.
There are always people in the comments taking the side of the company with arguments like "they need to make money" - sure, i'm all for capitalism, free markets and profits, but I use my right to whine when a company changes the status quo for the worse (from my POV). Public outcry is a way to pressure them to either keep the current situation, or think of something else.
Indeed. The idealized market is supposed to be a feedback-based system. Publicly wining about what a company is doing is a form of consumer feedback just as much as "voting with your wallet" is, and arguably more effective.
For companies, it's Marketing 101 that if you can't or don't want to sell what people want, you can always brainwash or beat[0] people into "wanting" the thing you want to sell. But we do not have to take such treatment silently, or without a fight. By resisting, we raise the costs of anti-consumer moves ever so slightly. Maybe, sometimes, just enough to make the company - or the next one to follow - rethink if the change is really worth doing after all.
--
[0] - Metaphorically, of course. But when a company cancels the very product people like the most, in order to force them to use an inferior product, and knowing full well none of the competitors will come up with a replacement (because they're all in lock step, what isn't profitable for one won't be for another, etc.) - being on a receiving end of that does feel like being beaten into submission.
> I just don't think it's right to have to pay.
So you don't want to watch ads and don't want to pay for premium. What do you propose Youtube should do to make money to run the platform?
Why is that my problem?
Because at some point YouTube doesn’t run the platform anymore?
I would rather see YT shut down and spark creative alternatives than continue its race to the bottom.
Google is rich. Their products have stagnated. They have no user support to reconcile mistaken flags or strikes.
It's anti user, the platform should be pro user. I'd like to see dark patterns pay their price and become deincentivized.
I share the sentiments — I happily pay for all kinds of digital subs, but YouTube really rubs me the wrong way. Yes, it feels like they’re trying to trick me into a sub, and yes I realize if I do it, the tricks will go away. I just don’t feel good about giving money to a company like this.
It’s the same reason I eventually got rid of my Pixel — it felt like a box just for Google to push ads at me, even though it was a premium product at a premium price.
I'm tempted to get a Pixel phone just because it seems well-supported by LineageOS, which should eliminate the ad-pushing issue.
I actually was a Play Music subscriber before it got rolled into YouTube premium (rip). So I never saw the popups except (ironically?) on my @google.com work account.
And that's super annoying even then.
I watch so much YouTube on my TV that Premium just makes sense. I can't block ads on my TV. It's really worth it in that case. The experience of watching brain rotting ads is such an undesirable prospect I will gladly pay them to avoid it.
Same for me. I don't think I've ever watched any of the Premium content, I just subscribed to hide ads.
So YT is too greedy and shows you a lot of ads and loses trust, but if they were to play it cool and stop showing ads you’d sign up for premium?
I think it's more nuanced than that. Personally I love/hate YouTube:
Love:
* Most of my favorite creators are there
* Ahh, that's it.
Hate:
* Seems to have no actual humans working there, or no way to reach them in the event of disputes. If someone posting to HN about their business locked out of their account is the best way to get support, there's a problem.
* Keeps getting better and better at..... pushing extremist content and crypto scams.
* Removes tools (like dislike counts) that helped users spot bad content.
* Charges $23/mo for premium which bundles a bunch of stuff I don't give a rat's ass about (youtube music? no thank you!), in addition to just removing ads. (That's only $2 less than I pay for my cable modem, like, seriously ridiculous territory.)
* Doesn't disclose how much of that subscription actually ends up in creators' pockets.
If they solved those last two issues, would I sign up? Ahh, no. They're still a net negative.
I'd much rather try to drag my favorite creators into posting elsewhere. I've signed up for Nebula and I support roughly two dozen creators on Patreon and similar tipjar/support systems. I'm trying to put my money where my mouth is, because IMO YouTube is circling the drain and getting desperate, and the sooner we develop viable alternatives, the better.
So, no, there's nothing YouTube (and their parent corporation DoubleClick wearing a Google mask) can do at this point would make me cut them a check. I'm working as hard as I reasonably can to make them obsolete.
>Most of my favorite creators are there
>Doesn't disclose how much of that subscription actually ends up in creators' pockets.
Enough for your favorite creators to be there.
>Charges $23/mo for premium
It's $23/mo because people like you block ads. The ad blocker-blockers can't roll out soon enough. Fingers crossed.
Cool. I'll just use my "block adblock-blocker scripts".
They already exist. But some will be inconvenienced. Us pierats won't be :D
http://reek.github.io/anti-adblock-killer/#filterlist
It's $11.99 per month and $6.99 for students.
Where are you all getting $23 from?
You think Google wouldn't increase prices the moment they manage to defy all attempts to block ads?
* They fuck over music creators and don’t give a hoot (probably because there are no humans working for Google anyway)
YouTube premium was probably the best decision I did. Amount of time saved on ads alone makes it worth it. Other bonus feature - downloading videos. If you make enough money it is a no brainer together with things like extra cloud storage from google, Apple and now ChatGPT
These days, I'll happily not use a service/ product/ whatever if I have to pay for it.
But YouTube Premium, ad free, is wonderful. I bought it for my parents because they watch a lot of niche stuff. But now that I have it, it's worth even the crazy price increase (to like, $22/mo or something).
I like it better than Netflix/ Disney+/ HBO Max, as it's half entertainment, half educational (whereas the other streaming services are more entertainment and often doesn't keep me interested in spite of their catalogues).
the Family sharing of YouTube Premium is worth every penny I pay for it times 5. easily.
You can save even more time by using SponsorBlock. I believe premium only gives you fake downloading -- you can't take it out of their app (correct me if I'm wrong). In contrast yt-dlp gives you direct access to the files.
YouTube premium downloading does store the video in the browser data store I think, yes.
I use yt-dlp for videos I want to keep a copy of, which are few and far between, and I use YT premium's download feature to queue up stuff I want to watch on my phone later when I know I'm going to a poor coverage area.
there's room for both solutions in my world.
True - With RIAA and such making YT implement something that looks like DRM just to say they have DRM on songs, I don't think YT is ready to actually offer downloading other peoples' videos from their official UI. For those that don't want to mess with yt-dlp, it's easy enough to search "youtube downloader" on Google.
I'm a heavy YouTube user (by my own standards... 2-3 hours a day) and a happy premium subscriber, and I totally agree that sponsorblock is a must-have.
>YouTube premium was probably the best decision I did. Amount of time saved on ads alone makes it worth it.
Why do you get ads? I don't understand how there are people on Hacker News that don't use content blockers. Is is because of principle?
Uses the app on iPhone maybe? There's probably an app that bypasses ads though.
Ah. I was forgetting people use locked down devices where content blocking isn't possible, or a hassle.
Yeah. I use iPhone. There is 1block but I am not sure if it blocks YouTube ads since I haven’t tested.
It blocks them in safari (since it's a safari extension) but not in any other app
I just watch from the Brave browser, built in ad-blocker
I think that's biggest issue in this thread. People locked down into their devices not even realizing there's relatively free-er world outside their locked-device bubble.
Blocking ads on the youtube mobile app (or even a mobile browser) is much more difficult than on desktop.
Ads can be blocked on mobile devices with NewPipe[1], or Invidious[2], alternatively Firefox which supports uBlock[3] on Android.
[1]: https://newpipe.net/ [2]: https://invidious.io/ [3]: https://ublockorigin.com/
It's not, FireFox or ReVanced does the trick
Use Brave Browser. It blocks ads for YouTube. You can even lock the screen and it’ll still play in the background (iOS).
I barely visit sites with ads. And on my phone I have 1Blocker that blocks all the sites. I used to be very tech savvy and solved a lot of problems with coding/software etc, no I grew up and switched to Mac and iPhone and if there is a problem (aka YouTube ads) that can be solved with money then I buy it. I used to torrent movies but now I value my time more than money and happily pay or overpay to save any time that is wasted.
I don't use a blocker because the arms race leads to bad outcomes. I'm doing my part to postpone that as much as possible.
I've lived my whole life, just about, with an ad blocker in my browser, and I have yet to see the prophesised arms race. Maybe a dozen sites have refused to load the actual content, and of those only a couple asked me to subscribe (pay) for an ad-free experience (they were newspapers IIRC).
Not sure what you don’t trust about it. I love Premium. I’ve had it for years, and YouTube is the best streaming platform there is in my book. It honestly just seems like something you are being stubborn over for no good reason. Stop hitting yourself sort of thing. No one is bullying you. Oh, they are advertising a service in their app that dramatically improves the experience and supports the channels you watch. But no, they are bullying you. Please.
You're not missing anything. The really weird thing about Youtube Premium is that even if you do pay for it, you're better off not signing into your account and still using uBlock Origin and NewPipe.
I paid for Youtube Premium for a pretty long while, and the only reason to pay for it is because you want to support Youtube. The official app for Android was awful the last time I used it, I've never been tempted to go back to it from NewPipe. You'd download videos and sometimes Youtube would just decide, "no, that's not downloaded anymore." It was way more battery hungry than NewPipe. I had less control over mobile data. It was glitchier and I couldn't turn off distracting features like comments or recommendations.
There was also this weird problem where signing in on both desktop and mobile would occasionally mess with playback and Google would tell me that I needed to only have a video on one device at a time. NewPipe doesn't have that problem.
And there's the privacy angle: Youtube Premium necessarily requires you to be logged in and to have your videos tracked, that's part of how the funds get distributed to creators.
---
So for a while I just gave Youtube money and literally didn't use the service at all, because adblocking was better in every way. But I gave them money because I wanted to pay for the service. And eventually I realized I couldn't figure out what I was paying for. I wasn't paying for content, because I wasn't logged in, so the people I was watching weren't getting subscription revenue from me. I was giving Google money, but it wasn't clear to me that giving them money was proving anything or making Youtube better or encouraging them to do anything -- whenever I looked at Youtube Premium it seemed like the service was actively getting worse and that a lot of the annoyances I was supposedly paying to avoid were creeping back into the service.
And I eventually realized that Youtube does provide Google value even if I'm not paying for it. It allows them to effectively hold a near-monopoly on independent video hosting online. And so I stopped paying for it because the only reason to pay for it was for an idealistic reason, and I realized that I'm actually be fine with Youtube failing and more independent sites popping up, and I don't actually want to encourage Youtube and if anything I'm happy for it to be a loss-leader for Google. For the creators themselves, direct donations turn out to be a lot more valuable, and I try to do that now when I can.
But every once and a while it comes up as an example of "people won't pay for anything" and like... I just don't think that's true. The reality is you are paying for less than nothing when you use Youtube Premium. You are paying for a worse experience than you would get from an adblocker, and in some cases you're paying for even more annoyance when Google starts getting snippy about how you use your accounts between computers. Idealism is one thing, but is it actually surprising to anyone that people don't feel motivated to donate money to Google?
Because that's what Youtube Premium is. There is no reason to use it unless you want to donate money to Google. The price isn't even the main issue -- even if Youtube Premium was free, I wouldn't use it. It's a worse experience than 3rd-party clients and adblockers. It exists so that Google can try to tie it into existing services or make a case to the public that they need ads, but this is not a serious effort by a company that actually wants to offer a real service for money.
> the only reason to pay for it is because you want to support Youtube
Or, and stick with me here, you want to support the creators. Because the creators get most of the money from premium subscriptions.
As per the creators, who see how much they get for premium views and ad views (they already know how much they’re getting from everyone else).
> Or, and stick with me here, you want to support the creators. Because the creators get most of the money from premium subscriptions.
I already brought this up above. The creators won't get money unless you sign into Youtube Premium and watch videos using that account, and that is a straightforwardly, almost universally worse experience than just using NewPipe and uBlock Origin anonymously.
Youtube Premium is more valuable to creators than ads, but part of the reason for that is because ads pay basically nothing to creators. The payout structure for Youtube Premium is weird and not really healthy for an ecosystem (since it works off of view percentages which discourages more professional projects in favor of spam). It's still not a lot of money, and it's ultimately a kind of bad system for funding creators. If you do want to support creators (and you should), donate to them directly when possible.
It doesn't make sense to purposefully make your viewing experience worse so that creators can get a fraction of that subscription revenue. You're supporting Youtube with Premium; but you'll help actual creators much more by using Patreon, Twitch subscriptions/donations, buying merchandise, or just donating directly if they support it.
Even if Youtube Premium was giving a comparable payout to direct support (which it's not), most creators on Youtube don't want to be reliant on Youtube for their revenue. Direct donations allow them to have more agency over the stuff they make, and subscriptions/purchases outside of Youtube allow them to stress out less about the fact that Google controls their entire livelihood.
So, since you want to watch with an account incompatible setup, premium is incapable of compensating creators. Ok. I get that.
I still disagree with your conclusion, since it’s a self imposed restriction that results in creators not being compensated. That’s on you, not YouTube.
> that results in creators not being compensated
I make a point to donate to creators I watch. I'm not compensating Youtube (although I did pay for Premium for quite a while), but I am compensating creators.
And yeah, that's easy for me rationalize, because I'm honestly not particularly happy with Youtube as it exists today, I think it has close to a monopoly on indie video online, and I think it would be good for other services to pop up around it. If it was possible for me to avoid Youtube entirely, I would, but... see the monopoly bit again. I don't think anyone saying "just walk away from Youtube" is making a serious suggestion.
But even given the above situation, if I thought paying for Youtube Premium would encourage Google in a positive direction, I would do it. I did do it. I just don't believe it will anymore. My experience with Youtube Premium was that it got weirder and weirder the longer I used it, and I didn't see any evidence it was helping Youtube as a platform.
If I can get out of that relationship while still supporting creators, I'm happy to do so.
Same here but I skipped the Premium step. I pay creators directly, through Patreon and similar.
When the "how to replace the thermal cutout in a Kenmore dryer" video helped me (and did so with a minimum of fluff), I bought the parts from the company that posted the video. (A whole set of spares, because why not? Pay shipping once, put 'em on the shelf, and have a zero-minute response time next time something fails.)
When I realize I'm 3 videos deep into someone's channel and I'm wishing the clock wasn't staring at me so judgmentally, I head for their Patreon straight away. Or their merch store. Or whatever lets me tuck some money directly from my pocket into theirs.
The next step is to find hosting elsewhere. I should make another attempt with PeerTube or something, or see if someone's building a video frontend for IPFS or whatever. And then start pestering my favorite creators into double-posting their content. Yes it's more work, and they won't do it unless there's a base of users who likewise feel good about paying creators. But I can be the start of that.
I tried to self-host Peertube at least for my own content but it was too much work to keep up to date for me and I eventually ended up letting my private instance die.
I haven't looked around recently to see if there's managed hosting somewhere that I can link to my own domain, but I'd be very tempted to sign up for a service like that. I like the idea of Peertube quite a bit, particularly around how it manages bandwidth -- I think that's very clever. I just realized that I don't take an active enough IT role in my infrastructure to handle setting it up myself and to trust myself to keep it patched and secure.
----
But yeah, aside from hosting direct donations/purchases are the way to go. Sometimes that can be very difficult to do. Patreon has a lot of problems but has honestly been huge for enabling easier payments. We're in desperate need of better private micropayment systems for the web. Cryptocurrency was a disaster, and not everyone is always on sites like Patreon, which I get because it's work to maintain a presence on those sites.
YouTube Premium means you are paying YouTube for content made by someone else than YouTube, while YouTube generates lots of ad revenue from non-Premium users. Makes me feel I’m compensating the wrong person. I wish a higher percentage of my fees go directly to video makers and that they indicate clearly how much I gave each creator.
According to many creators, YT premium views are extremely lucrative for them.
Youtube is my living, Premium pays out a LOT more than ads do per view. It might be nearly 3X for me. So a Premium subscription definitely helps out the creators, a lot more than even watching ads.
If you don't mind sharing, how does Premium income compare to say Patreon?
Going from 1-10 cents per view to 3-30 cents per view (and this is generous, some estimates put the low end at 2/10 cents per view) doesn't seem that big of a deal. Encourage your subscribers to buy a single $5 superchat/superthanks/1 month membership instead (of which you get $3.50) every so often instead and continue to enjoy a life of improved sanity from no ads via adblock without paying an egregiously large monthly fee for Premium.
But viewers don't want to have to be constantly bombarded with "encouragement" for superchats. It's a bad experience no different than an in-video sponsored read, or any other YouTube ad.
I don't disagree, and I wouldn't suggest a creator constantly bombard it. (However, that might be most effective, as constantly bombarding with "like and subscribe" seems to be, though personally for me I don't tend to watch channels that do that and for the random videos I do see where they do, it's often skipped by sponsorblock.) However I think if a creator wants to be honest with their viewers that they will stop creating unless they can receive $X across ads/premium/superchats/patreon/as many options as they can, rather than trying to bully them into thinking the only choices of support are an absurd premium fee to the platform or psychological self-harm by enabling ads, that is a good thing. As would be their decision to actually stop spending their time doing something that isn't worthwhile to them if they can't make it. Meanwhile other creators will happily go on creating high quality stuff for free because they don't care about making money that way, and youtube itself will be fine as even adblocking users, who also never directly monetize another way, contribute enough indirect revenue (user profiling, algorithm shaping, user growth, recommending...) to the rest of google's empire that it doesn't matter. (And if they do monetize ever with e.g. a single $5 superchat once in a blue moon, google's $1.50 cut of that, even after their expenses of payment processing, can make up for quite a lot of missed ad impressions.)
Premium views pay out a lot more according to LinusTechTips [0,1], and early on it was paying out based on watch time, so hugely disproportionate payouts happened[2].
0: https://linustechtips.com/topic/928915-does-ltt-actually-mak...
1: https://twitter.com/LinusTech/status/1486935690315112455?s=2...
2: https://youtu.be/Rh5hL47z2us?t=434
YouTube Premium is my #1 favorite subscription. YouTube is unusable without it. I also get immense value from YouTube. It's really a win-win in my book.
Nah, Vanced (now ReVanced) is the way to go for mobile
What I don't understand (speaking of Vimeo) is why doesn't YouTube offer a plan where individual content creators can choose to pay a monthly fee to keep ads off of their own videos for all viewers. Speaking for myself I would happily pay for that.
You can read the Vimeo thread for why it can not work. If people pay a monthly fee, and their views skyrocket, you either have to force them to pay much more, or to restrict their views somehow, both of which are just so so bad compared to the current scenario (this is exactly what Vimeo did).
Same cost model as any hosting service.
Surely there must be limits, though. I have recently witnessed a couple of 1 hour+ long “adverts”. I can bear adverts when watching youtube videos. But not 1h+ long…
I subscribe to YTP, but still use incognito tabs plenty for stuff that I don't want recommendations from.
Fucking with adblockers there wouldn't exactly encourage me to keep the main subscription…
Isn't it Youtube's problem to make their business profitable? It's not a binary - they could offer a different deal with Premium, market it differently. Customers aren't rational - just like humans. They are a massive multinational - if anyone can figure it out, it's them.
Maybe the ad model doesn't work, and people are not clear on what they are actually paying for, since it's effortless to get the same service for free.
Edit: And I'm suprised few people are mentionning how much information youtube gets about you from using the site, and using youtube premium makes being anonymous impossible. Having a way to remaing somewhat anonymous would make me consider premium, but it's a not go for me at this time
It is YouTube's problem to make their business profitable. And hence they will make efforts like what the article says. If things don't work they might require login and enforce ads somehow (YouTube will survive that I think, even if there is some viewership drop). There is no magic wand here that they can figure out (look at competing video services like Vimeo for an example). In the long run in 20 years if YouTube is deemed unprofitable as a whole for the company, it might even be shut down, and nobody might be willing to host another YouTube like service as is without significant changes to monetisation.
I guess I'm fine with that! Or maybe some billionaire will make it it's gift to humanity. Crazy that we have public libraries but no public youtube/wiki government supported
YouTube costs a lot, and even that because it can rely on Google's amazing infrastructure which is optimised to the core. There is no billionaire who can even cover 10 years of YouTube costs.
Was looking for numbers on it, heres one :https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/
I think they're doing pretty great!
YouTube is very profitable
Source?
Please don’t ask for sources on publicly available information, as if it’s my responsibility to personally convince you of it.
It's not public. We only know revenues. So you should back up your claims with sources.
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/
Record proofits!
Revenue != profits
I'm sorry, in two years they upped their revenue by over 10b - from 19 to 28b - I'm fairly certain they are having record profits. (Google doesn't release numbers for youtube's revenue, so that's the best number you're getting)
You don't spend the kind of money staffing a product like YouTube unless there are lots of profits too.
Everyone seems to have read an article from 10+ years ago and haven't updated their opinion since. The internet is wildly different now. Tech makes huge profits.
Absolutely! I find it nuts to see so many people defending giant corporations - it's so backwards.
>Edit: And I'm suprised few people are mentionning how much information youtube gets about you from using the site, and using youtube premium makes being anonymous impossible.
This is an important point. How much money is Google making by being able to track and spy on YouTube viewers?
YouTube’s unit economics are fairly unique in that monetisation rates put a ceiling on video quality.
Even with the best networks and infrastructure in the world, they would struggle to break even on 4K video with say $2 CPM. Obviously they exceed that threshold at the moment for 4K, but maybe not for 8K or 16k.
If I didn't have to tie my identity to my browsing/watching history (through credit card) then I would pay... but I guess that would imply them supporting alternative payment methods and also them not being able to sell this data (i.e. the subscription would be more expensive).
Unlikely to happen, so I will keep ad-blocking or eventually stop watching if they make ad-blocking too difficult (happened with Twitch for me)
I feel the same way. It's not just about the privacy aspects, too. It's also about the convenience. I don't want to have to create and use an account just to pay for video content. I want something more along the lines of dropping coins/bills into the instrument case of a street musician.
I'd be ok woth paying for their service, as we use youtube a lot. But youtube forces you to create a google account and stay logged in. This way they can easily track almost everything you do on the web, and I'm definitely not ok with paying for being tracked. If this was a youtube-only account (as it was in the past) then I'll immediately start paying for their service.
This is a fair point. I too would appreciate some way to have an isolated YouTube account.
Firefox containers, set one up for youtube.
For Chrome you can setup up different profiles. It's not as nice as containers since separate profiles force you to have different Chrome windows, but it gets the job done.
I have a Facebook-only Chrome profile that keeps Facebook from tracking me all over the web.
That's my beef too. I already pay for twitch turbo which I find to be less valuable, so it's not the cost. I just don't want to be logged into youtube all the time. And I'll never log into my google account from a work computer.
Peer to peer and microtransactions might work. So some people with computers can keep one tab open and earn some crypto cents.
I'm not sure if it's possible to build P2P network with zero trust that could work like that.
One issue could be that participating person might technically be involved with distribution of forbidden content like child porn or disney cartoon. So even if they didn't know that and everything was encrypted, they might still be accountable for it, especially because they made money doing it.
People don't like micro transactions. Please try to think of one micro transaction product that ever got any traction.
The number of desktops is tiny compared to phone and laptop users, so I don't see how this can be scaled. (And it's not even clear the cents people would earn would even cover their electricity/data costs)
What many people specifically don’t like about subscriptions are the transactions, IMO. Transaction costs aren’t zero, and microtransactions just introduce more of them.
It's not that I wouldn't want to pay. I can just (so far) watch the stuff with an adblocker and have effectively no additional value by giving YouTube money for premium.
> And yes Netflix is not comparable, unlike YouTube, Netflix can highly leverage cache boxes at ISPs
Why can't Google do this? They already have presence at ISPs
Youtube has ~500 hours of video uploaded every minute. Netflix only has content from the past few months/years, and probably only a few thousand hours _total_.
Most of that content will hardly get any views though. Caching the top 10.000 on a daily basis will avoid most traffic.
I guess the reasoning is that Youtube has a way larger catalog while Netflix's catalog is comparatively small. I don't really think this really a legitimate reason though, given that most social media has huge power laws, that is it's likely that 99% of each day's views are for a very tiny number of videos comparable to the size of Netflix's catalog.
Yes, for the remaining 1% youtube has to provide some central service, but that's just a small fraction of their traffic, and if they run into cost problems there they just increase the size of the caches at the ISPs, or introduce layered caching (one for each continent, then one for each ISP, etc). They probably do all of that already.
Storing those huge amount of videos that get maybe 1 view per decade each, that's a different challenge, but I wouldn't say the traffic is. But I don't know youtube's data maybe there is no power law in effect for them, idk.
They do. The key phrase is “highly leverage.”
I think you make a good point but I think part of the problem is that it is difficult to get people to pay for something that they have gotten used to getting for free.
That is correct, and sometimes such free services go away if they don't make money in the long term. I don't want the same to happen to YouTube.
It makes no sense to pay for YouTube premium when you can use ad blockers. Which is why google is removing that option.
Unless you want to compensate the creators of the videos. Both Youtube itself and video creators need to be paid for them to keep going.
One thing I haven't seen discussed here is: how exactly are they going to remove that option? Are they going to embed the ads into the video stream on-the-fly somehow?
One way would be to require logins and then timeout accounts that behave abnormally wrt ads. Given that WASM will be mainstream soon, it will be hard to monkey patch the code to prevent all this.
Youtube can tell if an ad is blocked. They can then refuse to serve the video. Instead replacing it with an image that says "please turn off your adblocker" or the like.
I imagine they’d prevent the page from rendering and display a warning when an Adblocker is detected. Similar to what some publishers currently do.
YouTube premium is the definition of paying to watch ads.
If you want to skip ads your option is to block ads, not to buy premium
Some site off X free articles per month. Can't YT do the same? Along the same lines, if there are heavy TY users, can't they be ad'ed more than average?
The point being, it's hard to want to pay for the no-ads experience when you rarely if ever get to experience it and/or your YT usage is not that often.
I would pay, but I refuse to pay for YouTube music. I used the much superior Google Play Music until they killed it, and I refused to eat the new dogfood.
>people do not want to pay
People don't want to pay for subscriptions because everything has become a bait and switch with infinite tiers!
Whether it's the local newspaper, or a mega-tech company's corporate offerings.
I tried subscribing (online) to my hometown newspaper within the last year. And a major national news publication.
You know how people say (or used to) that the garbage on the internet is the fault of the public for not being willing to pay for good journalism.
Well, guess what? You pay, you're just a sucker, probably senile and out of touch, so every third thing you click on is still behind a pay wall in the hopes you'll upgrade.
And, you know, it's being done to big dumb corporations with all the software-as-a-service offerings, and they're sucking up your tax dollars from government the same way. I don't want to name names, but the entire game seems to be slicing up features randomly and making up excuses to charge more for almost every one.
YouTube premium has just one tier.
And before you raise the hypothetical question of additional tiers in future, by that kind of logic people shouldn't make any recurring purchase of anything since in future terms might change.
If there's just one tier, but it doesn't include what I'd expect, then I'd be even less happy than if there are more tiers - but they probably will get around to adding them.
What you are describing is just wishful thinking. There is no business model which has just one tier with the perfect specs and the perfect price for millions of people, let alone hundreds of millions.
For now.
It's just like cable TV. They promised that a subscription to cable TV would mean no ads. They lied, and went back on their promise within a very short time.
They'll do the same here.
But if you apply this line of reasoning, you will never make a single recurring purchase. Sure, if they introduce ads to premium I will be the among the first to cancel.
I would be happy to never make another recurring purchase ever again. Bill me for actual usage, like a utility, but subscriptions for everything sucks.
Then unsubscribe if or when they do. It’s not a contract with your soul on the line, it’s a monthly payment.
> by that kind of logic people shouldn't make any recurring purchase of anything since in future terms might change.
20 years ago, you'd be right. This argument would be paranoid nonsense. But that's not the world we live in.
We live in a world where your car manufacturer wants you to pay monthly for heated seats. Today it's normal for hardware you bought outright only works if you pay rent to someone else, and services like Netflix reduce features and increase the price. Amazon can, at any moment, delete books from your kindle that you already paid for. Digital rent extraction is a huge part of how the tech industry operates today.
Yes, you should avoid subscriptions where you can, because there is a real risk that they'll change the rules to take away what you paid for down the line.
And especially don't trust the advertising company to not put ads in their paid tiers down the line.
there are at least 2 tiers: "Youtube Premium" and "Youtube Premium Lite"
On the hand, people have been abused by Google (by way of stealing our attention) and Google has trained us not to pay for services.
So I can’t see how you expect me to trust the company that has tried to game me, and never disclosed that I was the product.
Why should I pay now ?
Paying to skip ads just raises the value of your attention even further because now they know you've got enough disposable income to pay for such frivolous things. The truth is that not advertising to everyone at all times is leaving money on the table and it's only a matter of time before some bonus-seeking executive turns that into his payday opportunity. Besides, even if you pay for premium you'll still get ads hardcoded into videos as sponsored segments and you'll still be tracked and profiled by Google.
Ads are immoral and should not be a valid business model to begin with. What YouTube is doing is exactly what should be done: pay us, or we won't actually send you the video. The network is the boundary: I'm not gonna try to hack into their servers to get a video they don't want to send me. If they send me the video for free though, that's their decision. They can send me ads too hoping I'll look at then but I make no such promise. They don't get to complain at all if I block them just like magazines don't get to complain if I rip out the ad pages and throw them in the trash.
Many channels are successfully backed by patrons via patreon. That seems to be the most ethical way in my understanding.
> Ads are immoral
How do you justify this claim? How can advertising your product to attract customers be morally wrong?
I think the commenter meant "targeted advertising" which is the norm on the Internet.
I meant all forms of advertising but surveillance capitalism backed targeted advertising is certainly one of its worst forms.
I'll argue the case here though I go back and forth how strongly I hold this view.
Ads are immoral because modern advertising is carefully engineered brainwashing, often filled with factually incorrect claims (which are legally permitted as "hyperbole"). Beyond creating demand for products that the viewer would be better off without the brainwashing component in many often damages the viewers level of personal satisfaction or feelings of self worth by playing to their insecurities or creating unrealistic comparisons (which by implication or claim the purchase will cure). Because of this advertising can be negative sum -- anytime the benefit of introducing someone to the product is outweighed by the harm created by the effort to convince the user they need it. For example, ads for things you can't afford can create longing that can't be answered, yet don't provide you the benefit of the good (or the seller the benefit of the sale!).
One can construct advertising which is harder to fault morally, but because its less effective its generally outbid by things further over on the brainwashing spectrum.
Even where the ad can't be describe as brainwashing unless its in a catalogue of goods or similar, the user wasn't looking for it right now and so by forcing them to watch it you're taking their time. Because copyright creates a monopoly for goods, the user often doesn't have the opportunity to choose instead "similar to X but with less time wasting ads". Since the user is denied a practical alternative (other than a costly 'go without entirely') you cannot say that their consent to view the advertisement was freely given -- and consent not freely given isn't valid. As such, even a brainwashing free advertisement is ethically dubious because its stealing the user's time.
> One can construct advertising which is harder to fault morally, but because its less effective its generally outbid by things further over on the brainwashing spectrum.
I think there exists a solution, but it is a hard sell.
Ads by themselves are not inherently immoral. On the contrary, paid promotions performed by the person who is doing the show are part of the show, and, if done in good faith by a well-known and trusted person, can be considered a credible endorsement of the products being promoted. A relevant and creative promotion will not be skipped over even when there is such choice.
There are people who make mediocre/misleading/fraudulent/infected/immoral ads - this is one root of the evil, and the second root lies in creators willingly giving up part of the screen time to the content that they have no control over and that, realistically, no human other than the potentially-malicious advertisement author has approved for airing.
You are right that good ads are generally outbid by things further over on the brainwashing spectrum. So, it's bidding on ads that were not reviewed by relevant humans that's the problem.
Idea of a solution: make creators that want to profit from ads watch these ads and approve the best ones for their audience. Don't run unapproved ads no matter how high they bid.
The place where this fails is the extra amount of work shifted onto creators: it's too much work to watch let's say 50 ads that the algorithm thinks are relevant, in order to select the best 5, so that only they are rotated.
There's also the issue of the ad using a different language to the one that the creator knows about or an ad talking about a product they're not familiar with.
I guess they could just not approve of any of those ads but if their income plummets they might be tempted to start approving them
I justify it by stating that my attention belongs to me. No one is entitled to it. My attention is not a currency that can be used to pay for products. It doesn't belong to the corporation and it absolutely isn't something they can sell off to the highest bidder.
I choose what to pay attention to. Anyone and anything that grabs my attention without my consent is violating my boundaries. Advertising's entire business model consists of mind raping people for profit. Forcibly injecting their little brands, slogans, ideas into people's minds whether they want it or not. It increases revenue so everyone is heavily incentivized to consider it legitimate. Well I don't consider that activity to be legitimate at all.
Ad blocker? It's just self defense. I don't lose any sleep over it and neither should anyone else.
If someone taps you on the shoulder, they are performing an immoral action by grabbing your attention?
I think you have an irrationally radical take on this. I can understand disdain for targeted or excessive and intrusive ads -- I use an ad blocker too. But to say that advertising as a whole is immoral seems overblown.
What constitutes an ad? Can I put a yellow label on my can of beans I sell, or is that too vibrant and might catch your eye in the supermarket? Should all products and signage be black/white to protect your delicate attention span?
> If someone taps you on the shoulder, they are performing an immoral action by grabbing your attention?
My boundaries aren't so strict when it comes to my personal space. People usually have good reasons to call my attention when they tap my shoulders. I just don't get advertised to when I turn around to greet them. Usually they want to ask me a question or simply socialize.
People don't like to be rude. They don't like to bother others without good reason. They want the social activity to be a positive experience so that they will be accepted by others. That's the social norm and it protects me from abuses such as random people tapping me on the shoulder for idiotic reasons such as advertising. You'd have to be some kind of sociopath to think it's okay to tap someone on the shoulders and start pushing products at them the second they turn around. Mercifully, people that bold just don't seem to exist in my social circles.
> you have an irrationally radical take on this
Radical? OK. Nothing wrong with being radical. Compromise is the root of all evil.
Irrational? No. I spent a lot of time thinking about this. If you want to claim I'm irrational, you need to refute everything I've said to the point it looks like I'm babbling incoherently.
> But to say that advertising as a whole is immoral seems overblown.
Not at all. Advertising is by definition information people didn't ask for. It's noise, to be filtered. It's audiovisual pollution.
> What constitutes an ad?
Information I did not seek out. For example, when I open this web site, it's because I want to read and post comments. I don't come here to look at products. If HN starts sending me ads for products I'll block them.
> Can I put a yellow label on my can of beans I sell, or is that too vibrant and might catch your eye in the supermarket?
If I go to the supermarket, it's because I want to buy products. If I open an app store, it's because I want to see apps. It's okay to show me the stuff.
The key point here is I asked for it. I don't even consider it advertising in that case. It's just the information I wanted.
> Show Should all products and signage be black/white to protect your delicate attention span?
In my country there's laws in certain cities to that effect. I think it's pretty great.
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
>If you want to claim I'm irrational, you need to refute everything I've said to the point it looks like I'm babbling incoherently.
Your claim that advertising is immoral is what I see as irrational. Not that you hate ads. You've provided no grounds for why its actually inherently wrong to advertise. If anything, you've contradicted yourself. There are times where you think it is okay for something to grab your attention, like when you go to the supermarket.
Perhaps we are disagreeing on what an ad is. "Information I did not seek out" is not a good definition of an advertisement. Just because you are looking for it, doesn't mean it isn't an ad. I'd claim an ad is anything that promotes a product, service, or event. Given that definition, would you still consider all advertising immoral?
Ads are kinda a waste of time, and in case you didn't know, humans have very limited time.
I don't like that paid subscription services usually changes to be worse the day they get high enough market share. And content providers are severely fragmented that it become expensive to enjoy them all. Sure we can switch subscriptions for some months to enjoy different content provider for same expense, but it's such a hassle to do it imo.
I want a paid for video streaming service with the following:
* No attachment to Google
* Enough network effect / traction to be interesting
* No predatory data collection and recommendation algorithms
YouTube premium isn't that. So for now I use Newpipe and ad blockers. If they lock it down, hopefully there will be enough traction somewhere else to pick up where they left off.
What you want kinda exists in other hosting providers like Vimeo, but the economics is not pretty and most people don't want such a service (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28547578). What you missed in your requirement list is how much will you be willing to pay for the service you desire.
What’s really required is a much greater proportion of people like them.
It could be a public service, but people don't like these either.
The issue with YouTube is that it’s not a cheaper alternative. I think a lot of people are like me and find it mostly of little value which is why they don’t pay and will probably just stop using it if they have to go through a ton of ads.
I used to have Youtube Red or whatever it was, along with Google Music. Then they got rid of Google Music, replacing it with Youtube Music that I didn't want. And then they ruined Youtube by intentionally nerfing it on Firefox, ruining my subscription feed, changing the algorithm to reinforce short form clickbait, and adding things like Shorts and autoplay that, no matter how many times I turn them off, they always come back.
So I switched to Floatplane (3 subscriptions) and Spotify. I have no problem paying for content. I have a HUGE problem paying Google.
Probably the alternative is to simply not watch any video on YouTube at all. I'd love YouTube to do that for me because that's probably going to beneficial to me in general. I wish I could do that by myself.
People would buy two cups of boba tea, other than paying 12 per month.
Ain't nothing wrong with this, once it went free, it is hard to go back.
Except in other-than-first-world countries it's equivalent to tens of cups of tea.
Google does cache YouTube content in ISP data centers using GGC (Google Global Cache) servers. Their docs says the majority of GGC traffic is cacheable YouTube content.
https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/9058809?hl=en
https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/7658599?hl=en
It’s a recurring pattern on the Internet: people unashamedly claiming they’re getting X for free, and will gladly pay if Y condition is met. Then Y condition is met, and people (possibly the same, possibly different) unashamedly come up with new excuses of why they’re still getting it for free and won’t pay.
Never believe “I’ll pay if …” if you’re running a business.
Or this could be evidence that YouTube is coming up with new ways to be bad faster than they're fixing their problems. Shorts, removal of the Dislike button, repeatedly and retroactively changing the rules on 'advertiser friendliness' without warning, degrading their own search feature in favour of algorithmic content, spurious bans, a guilty-until-proven-innocent copyright strike system that's easily and openly exploited by bad actors and the inability of even million-subscriber channels to reach a human in support should any of those problems suddenly destroy their livelihood. Fixing any one of those things won't make YouTube good, nor does it inspire confidence that by the time any of them are fixed they won't have some up with some new form of awfulness.
> because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay
People don't want to pay for half-baked products:
- Workspace accounts don't work
- Even with standard accounts, it won't work on many devices (eg. TV apps), so you still get ads even as you paid
- As Google regularly kills people's account, it also means most of us have multiple Youtube accounts that we check in different contexts, and paying for premium on all of them is way more of a commitment that you make it sound like.
nonsense. these are not anywhere in the top hundred issues with the service.
workspace accounts are irrelevant to 99.99% of normal users. google hasn't encouraged using workspace accounts for consumer use for like ten years. the only place people care is on hacker news.
it works across almost all devices.
> People don't want to pay for half-baked products:
This is disingenuous, to be blunt. People do not block youtube ads because workspace accounts don't work or because Google kills off niche products or that people lose youtube accounts when switching devices. Switching profiles is already considered an inconvenience, due to the way the algorithms tailor so well, regardless of how often you may engage in it.
The ad blocker problem is less people explicitely blocking ads on Youtube, than people blanket blocking ads everywhere. They'd need to white list Youtube to disable it for that specific case.
So the question is whether they really _want_ to pay for Premium or not, the ad-blocker will probably stay on either way.
> Switching profiles is already considered an inconvenience
I'm not following. For instance I have a work profile, my main profile on my phone (mostly due to paying for Google One + apps + a bunch of services on that specific account), and other profiles on my other devices (home laptop + ipad)
I absolutely do not want my work account to share my personal algorithmic recommendations, or my main account getting killed because of anything happening on other devices, including facturation issues.
Funnily enough, even as those accounts are separate, there's still cross-contamination of the algorithmic recomendations, probably because they share the same IP or geoloc.
> due to the way the algorithms tailor so well
People on HN seem to have very different experiences on Youtube than I do. Do people here actually like Youtube's video recommendations? Youtube is my go-to example I give when I need to explain to people why algorithmic recommendations generally don't work well.
> People do not block youtube ads because [...]
I'll take a hardline position on this -- if Youtube Premium was free, it would not be worth using it to watch Youtube videos. The cost is not actually the main issue. The product itself is inferior to using 3rd-party tools.
I spent a decently long time paying for Youtube Premium because I wanted to pay for content, and deliberately not using it anyway because I also wanted to have a decent viewing experience. I can't speak for other people, but for me at least when I talk about the quality of the service, it's not an excuse. I deliberately paid for a product and I still didn't use it; that's how much I disliked it.
> Switching profiles is already considered an inconvenience, due to the way the algorithms tailor so well, regardless of how often you may engage in it.
The dealbreaker for me with YouTube Premium is that I'd have to sign into YouTube. And I'd need uBlock Origin anyway to block all the suggested video divs...
>People do not block youtube ads because workspace accounts don't work
Ohh me! Me! I do!
I was one of those people stupid enough to go along with Google Plus when it was still a thing. I had no problem with my account for that but didn't want my real name associated with my YouTube browsing habits. So I used the option that allowed me to keep my username in YouTube. Fast forward a few years and Google Plus goes away and somehow my YouTube account is some kind of brand account and Google needs me to verify that I am of age somehow. (As if they don't have this information already) But no matter what I do now somehow I need my administrator's account to approve my ability to watch YouTube uncensored.
So to make a long story short, after trying things constantly and getting no where I created an account for just YouTube videos and spam emails. I have absolutely no interest in giving Google any more than I absolutely have to in order to keep watching and will never give them money for YouTube. The whole thing is broken with no way to loop in an actual human being. Hell I even had people blaming me saying it was my own fault for using G+ (as if it was truly optional at the point this happened.)
>Even with standard accounts, it won't work on many devices (eg. TV apps), so you still get ads even as you paid
I really don't think this is true. I can't think of any official YouTube app where this won't work - across mobile devices, smart TVs, streaming boxes/sticks, games consoles.
I assume it got better with time, the main issue being that it needs to be dealt with client by client.
I tried a year ago and it was a miserable experience outside of the phone/computer browser landscape. I actually hope what you're saying is true, while also fearing that the next platform adding a youtube client will hit the same issues for the first X months until someone does something about it.
What? YT Premium doesn’t block ads on the TV apps? Really? If that’s true, they will never see a cent from me. I was on the fence, mainly since my usage varies a lot month to month in rather unpredictable ways. If YT Premium means I still see ads on the 65” screen, then no way no how.
It works fine on my tv, could be something specific to their setup
It's not true.
> Peer to Peer for streaming doesn't seem a reasonable alternative at any scale, since most people own phones and then laptops, and much fewer desktops.
Peer to peer streaming of the PeerTube type seems to work reasonably well. Unlike Mastodon, etc., you don't have to sign up to receive content. You just click on a URL and it works. What it doesn't offer is discovery. Nobody will find your stuff on PeerTube. They might follow links there.
I put metaverse tech demos on PeerTube.[1] Works fine, few views. No ads.
[1] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/tp9mLAQoHaFR32YAVKVDrz
> doesn't seem a reasonable alternative at *any scale*
Sure it works fine at trivial scale. But can it work at 1% of YouTube scale? How many nodes are needed for that to happen? Is that number viable?
No. 1% of YouTube is absolutely massive.
The way PeerTube works, if you're watching it, you're also sharing it. So it should scale for popular videos.
From user side Youtube discovery is almost completely broken anyway. I ended up removing both home feed and recommended videos block via extension because they didn't contribute anything besides frustration and page load time for a couple years now.
I learn about creators elsewhere and then look up and subscribe to their channel on YT. This flow will work just fine with p2p as long as creators have a video list and an rss feed anywhere on the internet and a single functioning search engine continues to exist.
This exactly, but even one step further - it’s time consuming and expensive to produce the videos themselves! Who’s going to create quality content if they can’t get paid for it?! This is the major value YouTube provides. They bridge the gap between consumers who don’t want to pay with producers that NEED to get paid.
Want free peer to peer streaming? Hard to build a content ecosystem on that.
Yes correct, for most streamers that I watch, YouTube seems to be an important part of their income. PeerTube will not magically create incentives for people to create content.
20 years ago there was no such job as “YouTube Creator”. If 20 years or less from now there once again isn’t, oh well.
The problem is that YouTube consists of two fundamentally different services.
One is a content hosting service like Imgur. The people hosting the content are the users. If there are any expenses involved, it's a matter between them and the service provider. The audience doesn't use the service deliberately. They just go there because someone wants to show them something.
The other is a platform where people try to make money with the content they produce. The audience are the users, and it's fair to expect them to pay one way or another. I'm not personally interested in using that YouTube, because I seem to be incompatible with videos as a content format. Pretty much every YouTube video like that I've seen would have been better as a written article.
The comparison to imgur is interesting, as imgur is itself trying hard to make money now by removing lots of content. The history of image hosting websites is a history filled with image hosts failing for the exact same reason.
This post should be an interesting read:
https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli...
The thing is, there is no way to provide a free content hosting service in the long run (whether image or video)
> Who’s going to create quality content if they can’t get paid for it?!
Many Youtube creators are Demonetized. They make money from other sources.
Also, not all creators making money are creating Quality Content. In fact a lot of content is recycled.
Not necessarily pure peer-to-peer, but I'm pretty sure some federated thing could absolutely work.
We just need this country/world to collectively remember what a library is.
YouTube has cache boxes at ISPs like Netflix.
YouTube Premium Family is worth every penny.
No, it's because we users no longer trust BigTech like Google to not be greedy and know that it is all about bait and switch.
They made "free" the norm on the internet as it increased the barriers for their competitors. Then started to show ads as nothing can be free for ever. And we users accepted that as a reasonable compromise with the belief that the ads will be limited. What happened? Bait and switch - from one to two to three banners in a page, from text ads to display ads to video ads, there was suddenly more ads than content on a web page. And the ads used more bandwidth than the content. Next came the assurance that our privacy wouldn't be compromised. Google pledged to "Do No Evil". What happened? Bait and switch - suddenly Google (or other BigTech) claimed that they just can't survive without personalised ads that need to be very privacy invasive. Now we are the products.
The bait and switch in Youtube (or any other streaming platform) is quite obvious - get us to pay for "ads free" video, and then suddenly introduce ads in the paid tier. Then offer another "ad free" tier for a higher price. No thanks, Google. We are not going to be fooled. Go ahead and introduce the anti-ad blockers - there is no way you are going to get me to pay to watch videos full of ads. Google's greed also needs limit. Especially when the user experience of most Google products have become worse.
This is exactly why I won't pay The Google a single nickel ever again. It would not surprise me in the least that, after all of this, they begin showing ads for Premium users and justifying it as being fewer ads than for free users. And I can't wait for their sycophants to come to their defense, shaming me for wanting "everything for free."
It's not about paid or free. It's about not trusting The Google, who I believe to be a bastard of a corporation. I pay for plenty of content creators on other platforms. But ads from The Google are the only way for anyone to make money? I don't buy it.
If Google removed the useless YouTube Music + exclusives and lowered the price it would be a lot more popular.
I pay for YouTube premium and for me it's worth it to remove the ads with the family plan. But paying for extra stuff you don't want sucks.
+1, I will pay for the removal of the adds but I couldn't care about YouTube TV or music. The price already feels too high but it's the one I don't rotate through compared to Netflix/Disney/Hulu/HBO which I watch a show then cancel.
I've said it before and I've said it again: ad-based content and pay content are incompatible business models. YouTube Premium fails because the content isn't worth paying for. The content is not worth paying for because it's been designed from the ground up to sell ads.
When a website designed to sell ads fails to sell content, that's not evidence that selling content doesn't work, it's evidence that selling content designed to sell ads doesn't work.
This is spot on. People assume Vimeo is the only competitor to YouTube, but that's wrong. Reddit is a perfectly fine competitor to YouTube in a sense that people don't really need the content to come in form of video.
No, just no. Reddits poor quality commentaries that are mostly bots and teen trollers, do not compare to millions of hours of content from verified experts amd amateurs alike showcasing or explaining something of interest to the viewer.
Thats like compairing backroom gossip to news. Sure both have their biases and inaccuracies, but at least one of them holds a resemblance of accountability as opposed to the other that can spew anonymous bogus crap at will. With zero consequence.
Reddit has very poor quality content. And it keeos on getting worse. Its just too riddled with bots. Imagine youtubes comment section without the videos. Reddit in a nutshell.
Reddit is enormously variable.
Yeah, stay far away from the most popular subs. The traffic is insane and there's no time to form any kind of community.
But you can find very good quality subreddits.
Small subs are often better, because the mods haven't burned out yet and people know each other.
And there's gems like /r/AskHistorians. Moderated with an iron fist, quality content is the only thing to be found there.
I think you're just not the audience. Most Millennials and early Gen Z/Zoomers grew up with YouTube and have long-term connections with tons of creators, communities, and groups of channels to watch it for hours a day if not >20 hours a week. For these users, paying for the privilege to access that content in an a-la-carte way without distractions is immensely valuable. Anecdotally, most of my friend groups pay for it in one way or another (e.g. splitting the cost of the subscription by using Google Families, or using the discounted student plan).
Ok, but one is far more likely to support a creator's patreon or personal website for exclusive content than pay for a heap of content that you are not enthusiastic about at best and is genuinely vile at worst.
No, I’m far more likely to just pay for the heap of content and watch/listen to the stuff I like than to pay for the Patreon of every single channel I watch and/or subscribe to. I’m at a point now where if I even slightly like a channel I’ll throw it in the subscription heap as a signal to YouTube to show me more of it. Conversely, there are two Patreons I support, one is on YouTube and the other is a webcomic.
In contrast with the sibling post, I do exactly this- support a wide variety of YouTube creators on Patreon.
I then use adblock and sponsorblock on YouTube. It seems like a good balance to me.
Sponsorblock is truly a godsend. I hear the word VPN 100x less a day than I used to.
I am a Millennial and I do feel connection to some creators. I am sad that I won't be able to watch the content anymore if Youtube blocks me. I will miss them and I will miss other cool content, like recorded conference talks and tutorial and stuff.
I did try Youtube without adblocker and it was unusable, and Google is horrible evil company that I am for sure not giving any money.
I'll miss it, but at the same time, Youtube is horrible time thief. It is bittersweet but it will make my life better to be without it. If I spent the time I have over the years wasted on Youtube instead reading books, hiking or working out, I'd be a much better person today.
YouTube is the most valuable and worth paying for video content I watch. And I subscribe to several streaming services in addition to YouTube premium. YT is the last one I’d give up. Not kidding.
YT premium is my only paid streaming and I'd simply stop watching youtube over going back to ads. I watch 2-3hrs of youtube a day and I'm glad that creators feel that YT premium revenue is a good source of revenue for them. Not their biggest, but a reasonable chunk.
I’m a full-time YouTuber. On a per-view basis, I earn slightly more from Premium views than from ad-watching views. (We’re talking tiny fractions of a cent, but they add up.)
Also, demonetized videos are still eligible for Premium revenue.
> demonetized videos are still eligible for Premium revenue.
Wow, TIL.
So you make more per view for a Premium subscriber. What about in total. What percent of your monthly profit is from Premium viewers vs Ad-watching viewers.
> What percent of your monthly profit is from Premium viewers vs Ad-watching viewers.
Around 5%
>YouTube Premium fails because the content isn't worth paying for.
I beg to differ. As a hobbyist type, and also someone interested in semi trashy niche content (true crime), having access to a virtually unlimited catalogue of fresh content, a lot of it exceptionally good quality, makes it absolutely worth the money.
If I could have any one subscription, it would be YouTube 10 times out of 10. And as someone who abhors advertising, I'm happy to pay.
You sound like you don't subscribe to youtube premium.
This mirrors my sentiments.
I love YouTube and pay for it.
I have YouTube Premium, it comes with YouTube music; I am perfectly happy paying for that as I consolidate music streaming with ad-free watching in my bed.
It replaced apple music and spotify for me; plus it gives me access to all sorts of music that is only released there as videos.
If I ever have to watch youtube with ads, I am going to just not YT at all.
If Youtube Premium actually blocked all the ads (including sponsored content), then I would pay for it. But it doesn't, so I have to use Sponsor Block anyway. Why pay for something that won't get the job done?
Sponsored content isn't controlled by YouTube though, it's controlled by the creator
Yet third party YT apps skip these annoying video parts. Premium definitely feels like a huge step down if you suddenly see ads in every second video and you are not used to.
which I am paying for anyway if I go premium
thanks, but no thanks
Sponsored content is regulated by Youtube's content policy like everything else on the platform, so it is in fact controlled by Youtube. The same way, the Youtuber's speech itself is controlled by Youtube, as shown by the recent “demonetize all the videos where people curse” (which generated much drama in the French Youtuber community, for cultural reasons).
Because YouTube shouldn't censor their creators.
Yeah, I'm the same. I spend hours on youtube, in fact we don't have any streaming or cables subscription and I don't miss it. The content is fantastic IMHO. I would pay for this one service. I'm actually seriously contemplating subscribing to it now, after all those many years of consuming it for free.
If you spend hours, it's so worth it. Youtube is a whole different experience without the constant ads.
Source: Been subscribed for years and I watch hours a day on _average_. In fact I might be addicted to YouTube, but that's a different story.
I'll drop a contrarian take. I love youtube premium. The content I "comsume" (yech!) is well worth the 12ish dollars. I could skip ads with a blocker, I could join every creator's patreon, I could watch/listen in firefox on my phone, I could yt-dl the videos for offline play.. But none of that is as convenient*cheap as a premium subscription.
I agree with this. Subscriptions are one thing, but we are missing the obvious here: people don't want ads. No need to pay to remove them when you can just use an ad blocker.
tldr: the commons seems undervalued by individuals
You can just use an ad blocker, and don't get me wrong, I hate ads. But youtube ads don't load potentially malicious scripts (for now), and they provide the money that incentivizes this MASSIVE open self publisher friendly library of video data. So adblocker on youtube reminds me of leaving grocery carts in the middle of parking lots. Stores like Aldi solve this by requiring a quarter to use their carts, but that's incinvenient.
Also reminds me of the open source funding challenge. The commons requires individual buy in and conscientious support, something that seems to be on the decline because(?) no one wants to carry free riders.
I couldn't disagree more.
The majority of my usage, and the usage of _many_ others based on the view count for DIY stuff, is watching people fix or build stuff. Usually because I'm in the middle of a project trying to figure out how to do something, or because I'm thinking about a project and wanting to get an idea of how difficult it'll be. Youtube University basically.
I pay for premium because it saves so much time, and I hate ads when I'm under a car trying to remember what bolt goes where.
Also, from an economic model, Stratechery has a great article last week discussing this - worth a read. https://stratechery.com/2023/the-unified-content-business-mo...
The problem with this logic is whether or not your usage mirrors sustainable usage if you're selling content - and I'd argue it doesn't.
The useful uses of YouTube are basically a side-effect of the real usage which is "get eyeballs on the screen to watch the screen more" - which is what you want when you sell ads, whereas you kind of want the opposite when you sell subscriptions - subscribed users who use the service as little as possible are cost efficient users.
The content is not worth paying for because it's been designed from the ground up to sell ads.
Some of it is, but the vast bulk of it clearly was not. You knew that of course.
I'd strongly consider paying for YT if it were an independent company. But as a part of Google - fuck no.
> I'd strongly consider paying for YT if it were an independent company
YT wouldn't be YT if it was an independent company. Lack of competition in the field is a proof
YouTube was bought by Google after it was already massively popular.
YouTube was just 18 months old when Google bought it and it had just started to fend off very costly copyright claims. It was popular, but 2006 popular.
YouTube was also unprofitable at the time. With out google backing youtube it may have gone the way of Napster.
By this logic, Netflix shouldn't be Netflix (or in its current market position) either.
YouTube Premium is the best thing I pay for each month (I actually don't pay for it it's included with Pixel Pass). It a little more than Apple Music and Spotify and you get that included into YouTube premium. YouTube has the largest music library out of any music streaming service. If you watch YouTube on a TV, YouTube premium is a must.
I switch between paying for streaming services on a regular basis, but YouTube Premium is the one that I stick with all the time. Lots of high quality content.
"YouTube Premium fails because the content isn't worth paying for."
Are you serious?
I've got youtube premium, nebula, curiositystream and I subscribe to various youtubers on floatplane.
And I've got to be honest – youtube premium is not really worth it. All the other services have high-quality content, because they're designed from the ground up for paying users.
Okay, so a lot of people are responding that they love YouTube content, and some of them pay for it.
Yes, obviously the largest crowdsourced video service in the world has some subscribers. But the fact is, they aren't enough subscribers to approach its ad revenue. If you don't address why that is, you're not really responding to my point.
Peer to peer using automated torrenting for video distribution of copyrighted media libraries has been reinvented and worked 3 separate times over the last decade (popcorntime, etc). It just doesn't work in the sense that as soon as it works and becomes popular it's attacked legally until it stops existing.
The problem is legal not technical.
Popcorn time is again like Netflix, not YouTube. Serving 10k movies is a vastly easier problem than YouTube (The few gaming channels I watch have more video content length than the movies on Netflix)
It can't be the perfect showcase because the service isn't even great, let alone if you compare it to "any" alternative, for example, it doesn't even have proper offline downloads, which is available for free with an alternative
Even great compared to what? You need to cite services similar to YouTube (like Vimeo, whose pricing model will just not be acceptable to anyone at HN), not frontends to YouTube, who don't do any of the expensive backend work.
Compared to the your own bar - perfection
(also, how is HN audience relevant in the conversation about the whole internet?)
Part of the problem for me is that sponsor spots in videos are so common now that I feel forced to run SponsorBlock. If I'm already having to run one extension just to enjoy the experience, then I may as well also use Adblock and not even bother with Premium. But since premium doesn't give that full ad-free experience (referring to sponsors), I just don't see as much benefit.
The amount of my life I save by using adblock + sponsorblock when watching YouTube is such a huge amount of time. Maybe I am just cheap, but I also feel it's a bit on the expensive side of things for what you get.
I do however still like to support creators that I watch a lot, so I'll use things like Patron, or in the case of Linus Tech Tips, Floatplane. I feel like directly supporting the creators I spend a lot more time watching makes more of an impact on supporting the content I enjoy. Creators don't seem to get much out of YouTube Premium viewers.
YT kind of started a soft assault on sponsor spots, with mobile users getting two-tap fast-forward, and encouraging creators to use chapters, making them choose to either fake their audience out with inaccurate chapters, or to include a sponsor chapter and assume x% of viewers are not going to see the sponsor spot.
I hate ads, but I'm largely ok with sponsor reads. They are by far the least evil and least annoying.
They are not targeted (everybody watching the video sees the same ad... for now). They don't invade my privacy. They are usually fairly short. They're usually somewhat relevant to the creator, and therefore my interests. Of course, it depends on the creator. Some have more integrity, others less.
If between Youtube Premium, Patreon, and sponsored segments or episodes creators can make a living, that sounds great to me. Better than TV, radio, or the increasingly expensive and ad-ified streaming services. I'll take it.
Yeah, I'm pretty okay with sponsored segments. By and large, the people I watch only accept sponsors that appear to be legitimate, and the read is generally "here's this service and what it does, give it a try and thank them for feeding me this week!" Or "I've been using this service since they started and I think it's pretty cool"
They're generally not low quality scammy products or designed to extract money or spy (with the exception of VPN ads, but that's a different issue).
I'm alright with them. I tend to skip them more these days because I can only hear about Brilliant and Squarespace so many times in a day
Can you see dislikes with YouTube Premium?
I don't want to pay YouTube
I'm happy subscribing to creators' patreons or Kofi or whatever because almost all of my money goes to them.
Whereas on YouTube, most of my money or ad-generated money goes to Google. YouTube pays creators very little and treats them very poorly. There's a new adpocalypse every few months where YouTube will randomly change the rules, retroactively demonetize and delist videos, while offering no chance to appeal or even have videos reviewed by a person.
Without even considering Google's generally evil and monopolistic behavior, why would I ever willingly give them money?
YouTube's shitty treatment of creators is why every video now has a sponsored segment in the middle. They aren't paying enough and creators need additional income sources. YouTube can decide at any moment without notice to nuke your entire business and give you no option to recover. They keep shittifying the website with shorts and aggressive ads and dark patterns to drive up ad exposure, but this doesn't translate to higher pay for creators. In no circumstance is giving google more money going to fix any of the problems.
All a YouTube plus subscription gets you is YouTube will turn off the ads and dark patterns designed to force you to pay for the subscription. As well, I have exactly zero faith that YouTube won't also start showing subscribed users ads in a year or two.
You and your creators use yt as a service. Their servers and network. Payment and others. That services don't come for free. If you don't give them any money, why Google need to provide the services?
If you don't like that, you can build your own server and steam from that.
My state has given Google a truckload of tax breaks to build data centers here while raising my tax rate consistently over the past half decade.
Forgive me if I don’t shed a tear for their hosting costs.
Unless the tax breaks are so high that the taxes actually go negative, they won't pay for hosting costs.
Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on anything related to this.
doesn't change the fact that they're receiving tax breaks. this creates an unfair advantage and nullifies any "build your own alternative" arguments.
Theyve also dominated the market with anti-consumer practices.
They should take responsibility for being the Internets video archive because they've faught so hard to become it and pushed everyone else out the market.
And I'd rather not use YouTube! I want nothing at all to do with google. They quite simply do not deserve my money.
How much money has google made on selling my data? What do I get in return? More ads. If I pay google to remove the ads, they still sell my data and they take my money directly. By playing the game at all, you can only lose. So to the extent that is possible, I don't play. I also feel exactly zero remorse for taking advantage of a company like google. Their practices are deeply unethical and harmful, being a monopoly is inherently bad, and stealing from them is an ethical net positive.
Don't be reductive, it makes you look uninformed. This is a much more complex issue than simply paying for bandwidth.
> So what is the alternative?
Most of the people and channels I follow are on Rumble. And no, most of them are not "right-wing" and fairly apolitical.
While I still use Youtube (for now, while adblockers work), the alternative is Rumble (or something Rumble like). The censorship/narrative control from Youtube(Google), along with the removal of the ability to "dislike" videos has resulted in site where it is difficult to sift through spam when it comes to non-controversial topics, and difficult to find what you are looking for if you are looking for information that may conflict with the current "official narrative" on disputed topics. It is very similar to the way Substack has become (for the most part) my alternative to magazine and "news" journals. Legacy platforms owned by corporate conglomerates still have a leg up when it comes to audience size and archival library size, but as far as content goes, they are rapidly falling behind.
I used to pay for it when it came with Google Play Music
The problem with YouTube premium is that it’s a music subscription service bundled with a video service. I have no interest in subsidizing the former to get the latter.
No, it perfectly showcases that people do not want to pay 1000% more money for the privilege of paying a monthly subscription.
Youtube Premium costs $12/month [1]. Ads average something like $2 per 1000 views to the creators (in some of the most common categories) [2]. Youtube takes a ~45% cut, so Youtube makes ~$4 per 1000 views from ads. So, to reach $12/month, you would need to average 3000 views per month. At a average of 30 days per month, you would need to consume on average 100(!) videos a day for Youtube to come out behind.
Wikipedia says Youtube made ~$28.8B in 2021 and had ~2.5B MAU as of the beginning of 2022. So, the average MAU only brings in ~$10/year. You need to average over 10x the number of views as the average MAU for Youtube Premium to come out behind for Youtube.
The actual alternative is that you charge a comparable price to the advertising revenue instead of complaining that it does not work because your consumers are not dumb enough to pay a 1000% markup.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/premium
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzb54Upcink
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube
I don't think you're taking everything into consideration here.
For one it's not only creators who make money. You also have to pay for hosting/development as well as Google's own profit. So the cost to buy ads is clearly greater than $2 per 1000.
I just looked and apparently the cost to buy 1000 views is about $20. So your off by 1000% yourself.
At that rate premium is priced equivalent to 600 views a month or 20 a day. Which doesn't sound absurd to me for someone who uses it as their main source of screen time.
Remember ad views /= video views. There may be 4 ads per video which mean we're talking about watching 5 videos per day.
How many ads would you see in a day watching cable?
If you only use it a few times a week to look up the odd tutorial or something then it's probably not worth it.
For anyone who watches hours everyday it seems a no brainer. I reckon the only reason people aren't buying is because of habit. They're used to ads so a subscription seems outrageous. With Netflix they're used to a subscription so an ad seems outrageous.
Or maybe the people being outraged are different people, I dunno.
I already accounted for all of those factors. The $2 per 1000 views was the estimated revenue from a video with 10 million views. That presumably accounts for the number of ads delivered over the average watch time of the video. The creator averages $2 per 1000 views which is their 55% cut of the ad revenue [1]. That averages out to around $4 per 1000 views in ad revenue paid to Youtube of which Youtube keeps 45% which is ~$2 and the creator keeps 55% which is also ~$2. Unless the "net revenue" they are mentioning is not actually the gross ad revenue from the ads, this logic is sound.
I have no idea where you are getting the $20 per 1000 views number from as no source is given. I have no private information on the topic as I do not run ads on Youtube or run a Youtube channel, but that does not seem to conform to any of the publicly disclosed information from Youtubers that I have ever seen in common entertainment categories. As seen in the video I showed, a channel targeting Finance does average ~$20 per 1000 views, but those are relatively narrow demographics and nowhere near the most common content. Do you have a advertising account on Youtube and the $20 is the number you are being quoted for a ad campaign? If so, is it targeting a high value, competitive demographic? Otherwise, what is the source of the $20 per 1000 views number?
[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72902?hl=en#zippy=...
I think you two are comparing different numbers.
You are discussing how much money content creators get paid for impressions.
The other person is discussing how much advertisers spend to for impressions.
In the middle is Google, which has it's own costs. If you are going to pay Google to not show you ads it makes more sense to base that off of the amount of revenue it would have generated from advertisers instead of the amount of revenue it pays to content creators on your behalf.
Again, Youtube splits ad revenue 55% to the creator and keeps 45% for themselves. The $4 per 1000 views number I am stating is the money advertisers are paying Youtube unless the term “net revenue” they are using in their revenue sharing FAQ does not mean the the incoming revenue from the ads. I am fairly certain that if they were deducting their cost of delivery from that number then net revenue would not be a correct term and they would need to disclose it as gross profit or some other non-revenue term. As a result, I believe my statement that Youtube is getting ~$4 per 1000 views from advertisers is a accurate representation of the information I have presented.
You've skipped paying additional rightsholders - subscription music rights are substantively more expensive than advertising funded ones. You've no processing fees.
In the US the avg cost of 1000 views to the advertiser is probably $15+. (I’ve spent millions(?) on YT ads)
You can’t average global numbers like that when the average in Indonesia is possibly sub a dollar.
So the premium YouTube subscription might just cost around double what is “fair”
Except those who are most likely to buy it are likely power users who watch twice as many videos.
Which would make the price perfectly fair.
So I’m not sure there’s really a problem here.
That is a good point. It is probably not fair to average globally.
Looking for some US only numbers [1]. It seems reasonable to estimate the US as having ~200M MAU. The revenue numbers reported there are ~$11B, ~$15B, ~$20B globally of which ~$2.5B, ~$3.5B, ~$4B were US only. So, the US was ~25% going down to ~20% globally.
If we extrapolate that forward at 20% (which likely overestimates the US share which was decreasing over the reported period) then the ~$28B in the current year would have ~$6B in US revenue over 200M users which is around $30 per year. This is 3x the number I originally calculated of $10 per year. This still results in 400% revenue for Youtube Premium over the average ad-supported user.
[1] https://spendmenot.com/blog/youtube-revenue-statistics/
What kind of person clicks on YouTube ads and what did you sell them?
That’s not how advertising work. Most of the time, the goal is to create/increase brand awareness, then when you have to buy something you will consider these brands, possibly in a more favorable way.
If I'm aware a brand is wasting money to make me waste my time, money that furthermore will affect their product prices, you can be sure I'm never buying anything from this brand unless there is no alternatives (in which case they don't need awareness)
The best examples are the subscriptions advertised on podcasts, which are invariably venture backed and remarkably shitty. How are the hosts so excited to get their memtal health records leaked!? (€£¥$)
That’s not how the average Joe’s brain is wired
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)
only ad I ever clicked on was a Swedish guy selling human meat for consumption. "Eat a Swede" a company in the lab grown meat space.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE-z6DQv5yg
But yes Ads are more about brand awareness than to actually get you to buy stuff.
I would have expected the human meat seller to be German. But just the concept of human meat, even if lab grown, makes me queasy.
lol, just realised about my mistake.Woops.
On the one hand, it seems sensible that, if you want to grow your own human muscles, the best thing to eat would be human muscles. On the other hand, for purposes of maintaining and repairing the muscles you already have, the nutrient profile you want is probably pretty different from that, and likely there are animals whose meat matches that profile more closely.
> it seems sensible that, if you want to grow your own human muscles, the best thing to eat would be human muscles
and plants shouldn't pull nutrients from the ground, they should only eat other plants! incredible how plants are not sensible!
The vast vast majority of people, including most people who think they don’t. Keep in mind a typical CTR for YT would be 0.5-3% so if you clicked 1 in 100 ads out of curiosity, you’re a median clicker. The second half of your question would take a long time to answer, sorry.
Also, if you look at content creators who share their revenue, they actually make more money from Premium subscribers than they do from ads. So if people want to really support content creators, then subscribing to Premium is the best option.
But what’s my time worth, not sitting through ads each month? If I make $12/hr, and I have to watch 120 30sec ads in a month of watching YouTube, I’ve broken even.
I think most of us make a bit more than 12/hr… so it quickly becomes worth it.
Obviously, that is why I specifically framed it in terms of Youtube's revenue generation. Youtube provides a ad-supported option and a paid option, except they charge 10x the rate for the paid option. Yet for some reason, the argument is always that nobody likes paid options or "microtransaction" models when the obvious problem with almost every scheme that companies try is that they always try to markup by like 1000% at a minimum.
Only if the time you save not watching ad, you actually work. What if you would just watch more videos in the same time or go to 9gag?
What if I am watching more videos that teach me something that ultimately make me earn more?
ADS is money I'm leaving on the table.
IMO That's the wrong question. The question is rather is the premium 'enough' to make it worth it to buy it or just stay with ad blocking as we did years before that option.
Apart from the excellent points raised by u/12907835202 in a sibling comment, another important consideration is that YT premium consumers are disproportionately rich compared to the entire YT consumer base. So if you are taking averages, you have to multiply them by at least 3x (i.e. 300%) to account for higher CPMs due to higher conversion values expected from such demographics.
This is the trap Musk was trying to walk Twitter in to with pay to remove ads.
Advertisers are paying a lot more to show ads to exactly the people that might pay to remove ads, wealthy people, especially US people.
The break even price for the subscription has to be much higher than the average revenue per user (globally ~1/10th of US revenue per user), and has to be higher than the average revenue for US users because of much higher advertising spend per user on that demographic.
So in order to not see ads, I must outbid companies who want to show me ads against my wishes. And like any protection scheme, being willing to pay makes you a bigger target. This is why adblockers are the only moral choice.
I say the real moral choice is not to consume that content. Using adblockers is akin to stealing, just because you are not willing to pay the price providers want to charge you.
When youtube.com sends me an HTML file full of links to videos, I am stealing nothing by ignoring some of those links and only watching the videos I care about.
I have no moral obligation to waste my time according to Google's preference.
You are freeloading no matter how much sophistry you try to cloak it with. They haven’t yet started enforcing their terms of service as strictly as they could but what you’re doing is no different from someone hopping the fare gate on a subway or bus and claiming it’s okay because the bus was going to run either way.
> You are freeloading no matter how much sophistry you try to cloak it with.
I'm not trying to cloak anything - of course it's freeloading. So what? We're all freeloading, all the time, on all the millions of things millions people have made and given away over the internet. Google didn't make those videos they're sharing, after all - they got that stuff for free!
If Google decides they no longer want to participate in the sharing economy, that's their business.
> what you’re doing is no different from someone hopping the fare gate on a subway or bus
There is no fare gate on this subway. There are no toll collectors; there are no tolls. Everyone rides for free. This transit network is paid for by the vendors running shops inside the stations, who hope to profit from the foot traffic. They can hope all they want that I will make purchases in their stores on my way to and from the train - but maybe I'm just not going to.
> We're all freeloading, all the time, on all the millions of things millions people have made and given away over the internet. Google didn't make those videos they're sharing, after all - they got that stuff for free!
This just isn't true. You're not freeloading if you use the service as designed – ad-supported services became predominant because that was the easiest way to reliably get enough revenue to run a business. Google pays roughly half of the ad revenue to people who make YouTube content, which may or may not be what you consider fair but it's definitely not free.
> > what you’re doing is no different from someone hopping the fare gate on a subway or bus
> There is no fare gate on this subway.
That's the ads – the terms are that you either watch ads or pay directly. When you bypass the ads, you're breaking that arrangement and depriving everyone of the money they would otherwise have earned. Now, you can argue that they get enough anyway but that's exactly the logic that people use to hop a fare-gate trying to claim that all of the other passengers are taking care of the cost. If that's who you want to be, just admit it.
> the terms are that you either watch ads or pay directly. When you bypass the ads, you're breaking that arrangement
Well, that's where we differ: you think there's an arrangement, which obligates you to support Google's profit model, and I simply don't. I never agreed to any terms, and other people's businesses are not my responsibility.
Do you feel obligated to buy a block of cheese after you eat the free sample on the tray at the grocery store?
YouTube has terms of service which you agreed to by continuing to use it. This article is about stricter enforcement of those terms so the only change is that you might soon be unable to pretend otherwise.
The cheese sample analogy breaks down as soon as you think about it. Unlike watching ads on YouTube, the samples are offered without any willing agreement to make a purchase but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other terms. For example, if you try to show up to the store naked or drunk you’ll be asked to leave because, like YouTube, it’s private property and the business has no obligation to provide service to people who don’t follow their terms. Similarly, you’d be refused entry if you started taking all of the samples or standing around shouting about how bad the cheese is. That store probably has a bathroom, but if you’re not a customer you aren’t allowed to use it.
All of this is conceptually very similar to that YouTube offers videos to people who watch ads (or pay) but the difference is that most people understand that it costs money to make physical things. Digital content has been ad supported for so long that many people think of it as free and are unwilling to even consider other models.
If you an tell me a way to teleport to an alternate reality without YouTube, I will take it. In this reality, 90+% of videos are hosted on YouTube simply due to network effects.
And yes, public transit should ideally be free to the passengers too - fare collection and enforcement is a giant waste of money when the whole thing is already largely funded via grants.
In both cases, yes, there are arguably better models but you get those by working for them, not freeloading.
For example, it’s easy to avoid YouTube but you’re supporting YouTube’s continued dominance by using it – even with an ad blocker, you’re contributing to views and likely engaged social activity which drives more traffic to YouTube, and for that matter there are a surprising number of people here contributing PR to YouTube pro bono by claiming there’s no alternative, which isn’t true but certainly what they want advertisers and creators to think.
Similarly, I also agree that there is a lot of unhealthy history around transit fares but dodging them does not build support for lowering them. You get that by working in the political process first and riding for free after that isn’t actively harmful for the service.
Picture an alternative universe where all transit was ad supported and everyone has to watch an ad before you can get on a bus. That or pay $1000 a month for free no-ad transit anywhere in a city.
Except there are some people with ad-blockers who can get on their bus immediately and always get to their destination earlier because of that, being more productive and mentally healthy throughout their life as a consequence of not watching ads every day of their life. All without paying $1000 a month.
People who dutifully watch ads (let's call them ad-watchers) think the ad-blockers are freeloaders and that they - the ad-watchers - are doing the difficult right thing by watching obtrusive long useless braindead ads every day since it supports the finances of the entire transit system. And that the ad-blockers are essentially stealing and should pay the $1000 a month if they want the ad free version.
The ad-blockers believe they are fighting a system they believe is harmful and want changes and argue they are using ad-blockers in a sort of protest as is their civil right. The ad-blockers point out they would rather have a system where customers can each rapidly pay for transit at a reasonably low fare and that $1000 a month is outrageous. Moreover that the advetisement saturation to support the transit system is likewise harmful, useless and inefficient and that there is a better way that will make everyone happy. They further argue that due to monopolies and network effects ad-blocking is the only option for anyone to easily protest as there are no private transit companies that have been able to gain the capital and infrastructure necessary to compete with the ad-supported transit hegemony.
The ad-watchers scoff and tell the ad-blockers that no matter how much sophistry they try to cloak it with to falsely paint themselves as protestors - what they are doing is no different from stealing and they are just lucky the transit system hasn't started more rigidly enforcing its terms of service.
Not just rich, they likely consume YT significantly higher than normal crowd, thus higher cost for Google to serve them. If someone watches 1 video a day in YT, they likely won't think of getting a subscription.
You can still sell those users' more valuable usage data and they've even coughed up a bunch of personal information to setup payment and have signaled that they have money and are willing to pay for things. So in return for paying they get no ads on this particular platform while getting a target painted on their back.
And if you need more money later you can just convert youtube premium from a no ads platform to a less ads platform. You just have to do it slowly so not to many people bail at once because the pot got to hot to fast
You also get YouTube Music, which is not as great as Spotify, but nonetheless worth something.
In fact, that’s the primary reason everyone I know who has YouTube Premium subscribes: music steaming + ad-free YouTube.
That needs to be factored into your calculation, no?
No, a bundled second thing that I won't use is worth $0 and so does not have to be factored in.
It's even worse, as they actively degrade the features you use.
With movies and music in the mix, international licensing agreements needs to be respected.
In short, I paid for YouTube premium to avoid ads. Then I travelled to another country where YouTube didn't have licensing rights for all of their movies and music, so my premium account was just disabled completely and I got ads again.
You can fix that with a VPN service, or by creating your own VPN network. You could buy a Digital Ocean droplet in your location and connect to that like a VPN.
https://www.digitalocean.com/solutions/vpn
1 - this is not a solution, it's a workaround. an adblocker solves the issue much better
2 - DO vpns are blocked (almost) everywhere
Are you asking people to pay additional money to a third party service so that they can continue to use a service they have already paid for and should be fixed by that service provider in the first place? Don't you think this is ridiculous?
Genuinely curious: if you bought YT premium mainly to block ads, why not just use Ublock Origin along with something like NextDNS?
I don't need youtube music and am lucky enough to have youtube premium lite available at 6€. That just eliminates ads for half the price.
being forced to pay for YouTube music is one of the reasons I ended my YouTube premium subscription years a while back
Great, then it shouldn't be a problem to offer a cheaper price for people who only want YouTube, right?
After you pay for the music rights for a subscription video service the cost base is identical. As you could use YouTube as a music streaming replacement service (and literally millions of people do) then the labels charge for the same license.
At least in Sweden they are offering Youtube Premium lite which is just ad-free Youtube (no Youtube Music)for about $6/month.
That’s about the level I would pay for the service, a major bummer that lite isn’t available in the US.
No, if they introduced this tomorrow you still wouldn't pay. Don't kid yourself.
> That needs to be factored into your calculation, no?
Only if I get to pay for a lifetime of access with a hand-drawn picture of a seven-legged spider.
I remember that being hilarious. Do you have a link to it?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/paying-bills-with-spid...
and
https://youtu.be/2IivXENMiI8
This could easily be fixed by paying the creators a much larger per view fee whenever a premium user watched their content. 1cent per view is 10$/cpm, that is 3-6 times more than what ads pay and would strongly incentivise creators to encourage subscribers go premium and create premium-only content for them. Now you can't do that because premium is a ghost-town and you lose ad revenue, but if, say 25% of users are premium then it starts to make financial sense.
Your suggestion to cut the price is unlikely to strongly increase premium subscriptions, YouTube has probably already set it to a revenue maximizing value.
Giving them my card data feels more expensive than $12/month. The model of paying to remove ads always felt like hostage taking.
"Is this ad annoying enough for you? No? You think you're a tough guy? Here's an advert of me slicing off your toes. Now tell me your home address so I can mail them to you. Read me the CVV2 numbers from the back of the card to make it stop!"
You can choose to pay for convenient download functionality and background playback on mobile, and think of the ads as a bonus, if you prefer.
Let me guess: the download functionality doesn't actually give me access to the DRM-free video file and when YT deletes a video it's useless to me.
Sure. I wouldn't recommend it for archival. I would recommend it for downloading a few videos before a trip when you expect flaky/slow internet. Much more convenient than the youtube-dl dance I did before. Ymmv.
Of course it doesn't. It's just allowing Google to have a local cache.
I'm a premium subscriber but the background playback thing is a pretty insulting idea to me. They can save like 95% of the bandwidth if I'm listening to something audio-only. So why make it part of the more expensive option?
It's probably a licensing thing due to the large amount of music on Youtube.
Nah, come on. It's just a popular feature that they locked behind the paywall, so that more people subscribe.
Don't get me wrong, I really like my Premium. But this decision is a business one, not a technical one, and I was charitable.
Even if it's a business decision, so what? It makes perfect sense, Youtube cant charge advertisers for video ads played when the app is in the background.
Nah, come on. The price is well worth it just for the hosting and internet traffic costs.
Can you put those numbers in terms of exec salaries?
Like, Google Cloud's 2023Q1 profits being ~85% of Sundar's 2022 earnings [0].
[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/03/google-employees-complain-ab...
You're assuming YouTube is not loosing money with non-paying customers...
Also there's the fact that once enough people get on board with the ad free subscription services, they usually just start adding ads anyway.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted, that’s true. I paid my Android TV $2000 and guess what? They added ads on the Home! Google sucks and there’s no way I’ll directly give them money, ever again.
I wasn't even thinking about Google specifically here, it seems like almost every ad free service eventually adds ads.
for eg. Netflix. Although they will try to convince that people will have to pay less.
I think a smart TV home screen showing you things you might consider watching on services you probably already subscribe to is in bounds. A bit like calling menu items at a restaurant advertising.
It's not, because it keeps suggesting stuff from Disney+, which I don't subscribe to. It's advertising.
It's also clearly not inspired from stuff I've watched, but from stuff announcers want me to watch.
This is just smart TV's in general. I have "The Frame" TV from Samsung and was super disappointed when I realized they put non-removable ads on the home page. Mostly from Disney+ which I don't even subscribe to. This is after I went through and spent an hour disabling their built-in autoplay cable-over-internet feature.
Advertisers aren't interested in buying only the eyeballs that are too poor to pay themselves out of the annoyance.
Youtube premium also includes other features, such as ability to download videos to view offline (e.g. flights).
But I also feel like you have an incorrect unstated assumption: People are not perfectly rational. The difference between paying $0 and paying $1 is ENORMOUSLY bigger than the difference between paying $1 and $12.
C.f. people will spend hours finding the perfect app that is also free, instead of just paying $2 for the perfect app they found after 2min. It doesn't make any sense.
Pirating YouTube videos with a third-party downloader also gives me the ability to download them for offline use, and see no ads.
I don't judge you, but when I actually can pay for a product that is as good as (or better) than pirated, then I don't mind paying.
For youtube I can. So I do. It's just a shame that so many industries give you a worse product than what you can pirate for free. I actually am willing to pay.
If I could pay the creators for what they make on YouTube, I would do so relatively cheerfully.
I have zero interest in giving money to a company that is actively trying to undermine everyone's privacy and security in the service of its own profit.
I guess that's what patreon is for.
It's not only about the markup imo. I share netflix and all with my girlfriend in the same household. But for YouTube we both need our own premium because of the weird limits. More than that I would likely need 2 for me alone because of the limits. Even more because I organized my abos in different accounts.
I would buy one, but I won't buy 3. And I won't buy even 1 when I still have ads every so often.
What weird limits ? What ads ? I'm sharing the yt premium with my whole family with no issues, and the only ads I see are the sponsoring from content creator directly in the video, but nothing from google
Only one device being able to hear music at once? Only 2 or so being able to watch movies at once? YouTube app and browser on the same device already being 2 devices. And yes with ads I mean sponsored ad blocks from the creators. Before I had these blocked I unsubbed more people than I subbed because of minute long VPN ads
Guess I'm dumb, because I've been subscribed to YouTube premium for quite a while now. I watch it on many devices that don't have any way of installing ad-blockers (like streaming devices to TVs). Not to mention, that an "ad" on YouTube has no time limit. I remember back when I didn't subscribe of seeing an ad for marble countertops that lasted over 45 minutes. Seriously. So if I just put on a bunch of videos to watch that may be like 10 minutes each, in between may be a 45 minute commercial that I have to go and physically hit the skip button. Sometimes I like to fall asleep listening to soothing videos, only to be hit with a fricken 45 minute commercial that's LOUD in between.
Sure, guess I'm dumb. But I don't care. Subscribing gets me what I need.
When looking at these numbers you have to remember that they are global numbers. Ads in rich countries like the US will make them way more money per user than the ads in poor countries. And YouTube Premium is also far cheaper in poor countries - it's like $2/mo in India, which probably pretty accurately reflects how much an average user draws in in each country.
Not to derail you but Premium costs $16/month when I view the option from the YouTube app on my phone. Not sure why this is the case.
EDIT: Never mind it’s just the apple tax. I had forgotten about it.
$12/mo is a ridiculously low amount compared to what value YouTube brings.
YouTube premium also includes a music service with near peer features to Spotify/Apple music. On its own that’s worth $5-$10 a month. There’s also other features like offline downloads and background audio for podcasts.
Ad removal is just one feature amongst many with YouTube premium. So it’s not fair to compare the subscription price entirely against the CPM of the adverts you don’t have to watch.
I'd disable my adblocker and revanced youtube if they stopped randomly terminating channels unreasonably and gave them proper means to contest wrongful terminations. If Google respects the people making a living off of them (mainly off superchats and memberships, not ads) so little, they don't deserve my respect either.
I'll just keep up with the inevitable cat and mouse game with adblockers.
The trouble with YouTube premium is that there are still ads. Every YouTuber I watch does paid promotions, submarine marketing or self-promotion. That happened when YT ad revenue was reduced but even if ad rev went back up, it will continue. The marketing relationships are there now and who would turn down exrtra cash.
My problem with youtube premium is that it doesn't remove ads. Most of the videos I watch on the platform have multiple in-video segments with advertisements directly from the video author. Youtube can easily solve this, considering the community-driven plugin SponsorBlock does it so effectively. But they are happy to charge you the premium fee and let you sit thru intrusive ads.
I pay for Nebula, which has far less content, but would never dream of paying YouTube.
I like Nebula and I like its creators and their values. I loath Google and I can't stand by much of the content.
"YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay (And I am not talking about too broke to pay cases)."
If this is true, and I have long believed it is, then the following, from the article, is a lie:
"It looks like you may be using an ad blocker. Ads allow YouTube to stay free for billions of users worldwide," the message adds.
If YouTube does not "stay free" then it shrinks to a small fraction of its current size.
So-called "tech" companies know users will not pay. This is not surprising since so much of the "content", none of which the "tech" company produces, is garbage. The stuff that goes "viral", that generates the most ad revenue, is not stuff people are going to pay for.
Either the "tech" company's website/app is free and a Trojan Horse by which its users can be spied on, or the "tech" business model isn't worth much of anything. Like someone said, "You are the product." Not the stuff uploaded by so-called "creators", YouTube's unpaid workforce.
"Ads allow YouTube to stay free for billions of users worldwide."
YouTube has to be free or it won't be able to continue operation. It's wonderful experiment, all this uploaded video, if we ignore all the surveillance Google is conducting and all propaganda and worse videos Google is forcibly putting in front of people, but this is not something many people with pay for. YouTube cannot convert "billions of users wordlwide" into paying subscribers.
Google might gain my favour if they become human again. Google is literally the most robotic company out there. There is so much they could do to make YT a better experience. But it suffers from developeritis, where it’s just a fancy tech stack (bravo!) but it wasn’t build for actual humans.
I pay for premium.
On one of my google accounts, and only if I am logged in.
For about 80% of my youtube watching experience this works.
But there are times I am logged in with my work account as (at the least) the primary account and I dont bother switching.
Or a random tutorial video I am looking at from a new laptop or untrusted device.
The pain of logging in outweighs looking at a couple of ads in the moment. So dont think that premium is a failed model based on usage. I certain I am not alone in engaging with youtube in a non-premium capacity despite having a subscription.
For me, text is fine. I'm a minority but I just avoid videos altogether.
Paying youtube for an infinite catalogue of shit? No thanks. And the rare gems that do interest me are invariably... overly expanded and filled with sponsor bullshit, so, ads.
Paying for YT premium to give Google their pound of flesh, only to be stuck in same horrorshow of well-meaning content creators having to whore themselves out to their sponsors... To me that means that the only winning move is not to play.
YouTube premium costs in Germany €15,99, which is more than Disney+ and AppleTV+ combined. I personally just don’t see the value in paying so much for it, considering all the other subscriptions that we have.
Uh, go to peering.google.net. See their “GGC” google global cache nodes. Those are all in-ISP. YouTube arguably has a larger in isp cache network than Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, …etc combined.
Id argue a large amount of YouTube’s traffic is cacheable.
Does youtube premium:
- Make the TV app be useful and not utter trash
- Allow me to globally disable/remove 'shorts'
- Stop promoting the front-page trash that is 'trending'
- Allow me to permanently filter music by genre or remove sports entirely
- Fix the recommendations engine to actually work
- Allow grouping/filtering subscriptions
Unless it does all of the above, there's no way I'm paying. Ads are an annoyance (and as others have said, most videos now run their own sponsorships/ads inside the video as well), but not having a well functioning 'application' in the first place means there's nothing worth paying for.
If I was given some assurances of what I was paying for, sure, I wouldn't mind paying a few bucks a month to get access to YouTube. Right now, I'm not willing to pay for a platform that is operated so poorly:
* Content is prioritized and screwed with too often. Videos that have no business anywhere near front-page or that are overall not well received are promoted because of shady backdoor deals with media companies. This is why late night talk show content is on the front page. I do not want to pay to support this.
* Content I have opted into seeing is suppressed, censored, etc. Creators that I enjoy have to modify how they make videos because of obscure and virtually unexplained reasons that YouTube mostly hand waves away as "the AI does a thing". They do not properly staff any kind of human review. The only way creators get their accounts back after the system goes completely haywire is by complaining on Twitter or other platforms and those without a megaphone get lost to the broken system. I am not interested in paying to support this.
* Basic features like comments have serious problems with them. The community has to attempt to hodge-podge together solutions while a multi-billion dollar company fails to do anything or provide the tools to stop rampant scams of a few basic types from ruining the comment section. I do not want to pay to support this.
* Features are randomly removed or subject to strange choices like the dislike button because a few people at YouTube think they know what the massive billions of people on the platform is best for them. I don't want to pay to support this.
Give me the option to pay and be free from these terrible choices YouTube makes and you can have my entire wallet.
At least for me, YouTube premium does not work because I do not want Google to save everyting I watch, that's why I use it as unlogged. I already have a gmail account, I use Google search, therefore Google has already quite amount of data about me, let's just not have it my Youtube history also.
When Youtube arrived first, I had an account with some playlists, then Google decided to merge account and asked me to switch a google account in order to keep my youtube account, that was the time I decided not to have an account on Youtube and subscribtion requires an account.
Also for subscriptions generally, thing are getting wild. There are several paid video / streaming services. Just to be able to watch 3 or 4 shows requires almost being subscribed to all streaming services, which is both expensive (at least for some part of the world) and ridicilous.
> Serving an infinite video catalog is very expensive in terms of all resources
How much would they save if "free" users only got 480p videos?
I'd be fine with 480p resolution.
don't be so modest.
720p is an acceptable low bar
For me, 480p is not even modest, it's close to the height I get for a landscape video when holding my phone in portrait.
I also don't usually need the extra pixels, as there is seldom important content in the fine details — a few years ago, when I was prepping to leave the UK but not everything lined up to the same dates, I was using PAYG mobile for home internet and therefore set the videos to 240p; the only reason that didn't really work was that not all videos had such low resolution, and when they didn't the site defaulted to 720p.
yea, 480p is ok for phones.
720p brings a noticeable improvement for watching on something 40"+ (tv).
going further to 1080p is only a marginal improvement over 720p so i usually "keep it simple/small"
>people do not want to pay
We don't REALLY know that. If adblockers are effectively blocked, we might see an increase in people paying. The big value add of Premium was something people here were taking for granted because that "feature" was available for free.
Anecdotal but I knew a few people who are paying for it because of Apple TVs and iPhones where it's less trivial to block the ads on the apps.
The problem at the core is subscription fatigue. Netflix, Prime, Disney, HBO, newspapers, cable TV, sports... that shit adds up.
> YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay
Absolutly wrong. I pay for spotify to not have ads, I pay for netflix despite the fact I can download torrents because of the benefit of the service. Hell, I pay for Telegram premium and chatgpt, both of which have very good free offer without ads!
But GAFAMS have exhausted our trust, so they don't get the same treatment.
I will never pay for a Google service, because that would mean having a google account tie to a payment system. And Google spies, collect data, close accounts and services on a whim and has terrible support.
It doesn't respect their customers, and so they lost our will to give them money.
Plus, even if you pay, you have no way to know if they are going to respect their own contract anymore because they don't care and have no consequence for messing up.
You pay for an amazon product? Can be a scam and amazon will not prevent that. You pay for twitter blue to see less ads? We just learned this month tweeter blue users say exactly as many ads as regular users.
> So what is the alternative?
We don't want an alternative. Those companies made billions with their short term abusing policies, now they finally pay some price.
Good.
For once the market is behaving as a regulating force as it should, which is not often nowadays.
A model where the uploader pays. Vimeo pro plans have something like that.
This idea that uploading is free artificially created by big data and somehow we think that's the way it should be. But really it's just their strategy, get as much data in then tax those who want to access it, even forgetting about the whole ML angle it's very simple to understand.
That model doesn't work, see the link I included about Vimeo.
The model would work, it just needs to be properly implemented. I guess it's hard when YouTube etc. keeps people accustomed to not even rock bottom prices but completely free stuff.
Reasons for not going Youtube Premium -
1) Don't want Youtube to connect me to my real identity. I browse incognito, or using alt IDs.
2) Many creators I follow are demonetized.
Why should I reward Youtube ?
If I want to pay, I would rather pay them directly. It's their content that I watch.
3) I have seen a Ton of financial scams for targeting poor people using the names of Credible Top Brands in the country . The fact that Youtube approves such shady Ads doesn't feel right to me.
What's the alternative ? Instagram Reels and TikTok already rule short form videos.
If they can introduce a better Search Experience and a Long Form Video product, there will be a credible competitor to Youtube.
I strongly disagree Netflix isn’t a comparable alternative as it enables me to watch moving pictures to occupy my time. Worse YouTube gets their movies for free.
I understand that they are in a bind. Not my problem, however.
I would pay if they stopped censoring creators.
> YouTube premium perfectly showcases why ads dominate the internet, because even when there is a paid option for a service much cheaper than any alternative, people do not want to pay
I'd argue exactly the opposite, since over 25 million people pay for YouTube Premium.
Is it weird that this makes me want to subscribe to YouTube premium less than before? Feels like I've been poised to give them money for a while, since so many people seem to like the service. Now I feel like they're challenging me to a duel.
I’m happy because I won’t pay them and now they’re forcing me off the platform, win for me.
That’s a win win. You shouldn’t be forced to use the platform. And the platform shouldn’t be forced to provide you services for free
If Google didn’t have such a abysmal business model to start with, this wouldn’t be an issue.
They offered services for free without providing the disclaimer.
The attention economy is a toxic poison, I think more people than you realise are now aware of this and are less likely to pay for something Google offers because of it.
I don’t hate Google, but they’ve eroded a lot of trust.
The "attention economy" has always been there. If you truly value your time so much you should be glad to have an option to pay for ads to be gone.
So as I said, I'm glad they've given me more incentive to not use their products. It's ok if we disagree I guess.
I looked into subscribing because I don't mind paying to avoid the ads.
I don't like the spying that will go along with paying, given that it is Alphabet/Google. If they offered a plan to pay without the spying I would have signed up years ago.
I didn't try so I could be wrong but my guess is your payment will be tied directly to your login and so you need to have that login on the browser at all times to view the videos (without ads) and given all the decline of "do no evil" I don't trust them at all.
I also don't trust they wouldn't mess things up. I travel a lot. I paid for YouTube TV and the ludicrous junk they do to try and verify you are able to view things was a huge pain and failed quite a lot until it failed nearly always I and dropped it.
I imagine if they push me I will pay and then have to copy and paste every YouTube url into a sanitized browser instance only used for YouTube. But I don't trust Alphabet/Google to not constantly be attempting to use that subscription to improve and deepen their spying which annoys me quite a bit. I just trust them a tiny bit more than Microsoft (and I ditched using anything by Microsoft decades ago - other than my use of LinkedIn continuing after they bought it and very occasional uses of Bing to check on it).
How does subscribing increase their spying? Beyond the obvious that they now have your billing address.
You can watch Youtube incognito for free but you need to login to benefit from subscribing.
You can delete your watch history after every session or have something automated do it for you. That will work fine if you only want to watch the content you subscribed to.
If you want better recommendations though you may have to tolerate some things that you may consider "spying".
Lol how cute people think deleting watch history has any real effect.
Also cute these people think using incognito does anything to stop Google from tying the traffic back to them. They already finger print you off hundreds of parameters. Hell most people are literally using their web browser.
You'd have to assume history is actually deleted and not just simply hidden from the user. Pretty high bar to pass given it's Google.
I personally don't care for better recommendations. I just need a functional subscription/notification system and much much better search.
You'd also have to trust that YT doesn't track you in the incognito window, given that it's still pretty easy to identify an user and you're also most likely using Google's own browser to hide.
If you really don't want to be tracked by Google, you should probably consider not using their services.
I'm afraid you are making a mistake in assuming that Incognito mode == no tracking. The only thing that Incognito mode does is not save any local history or cookies. This is mainly of benefit for people who share a computer and don't want the other users to see their history.
Tracking has long moved way beyond cookies and Google is absolutely tracking what you do in incognito mode and doing their best (which is highly effective) to associate the tracking data with you.
Try youtube-dl or one of the clones.
How does this work for users that are not using a desktop OS/browser? Is there a mobile app that does this and holds the content for local viewing?
I’ve used it with Plex, works fine
Newpipe.
On Android, there are a number of solutions, like NewPipe (YT client) and Seal (downloader).
All of the above will be detected and blocked by YouTube.
This would mean YouTube will have to break compatibility with countless outdated Android / iOS apps, Smart TVs and other devices. Not gonna happen anytime soon.
> YouTube will have to break compatibility with countless outdated Android / iOS apps, Smart TVs and other devices
Minus smart TVs, this seems like the point of the policy change. (And even on the TVs, if they're watching without paying while blocking ads, that's purely a cost centre.)
If we enter Twitter as evidence into the record of yanking the cord on 3rd party apps getting a free ride off your company's hard work, then maybe Google has decided the negatives do not outweigh the positives.
You aren’t understanding. They can’t change the old unpublished APIs because it will break the old devices. We use those to get the videos without the ads.
What reason does YT have to NOT make changes that prevent those devices from working? Is there an avenue for these 3rd party devices to pay YT for their services? If these apps/devices are making a buck off of YT rent free, then they should be able to yank the cord whenever they want.
Your comment reads as if you feel that YT has some sort of obligation to continue letting 3rd parties make money from the work of YT without any compensation.
Device manufacturers not just use some private API or SDKs without making deal with Google. Except might be for Chinese noname brands from AliExpress.
All device manufacturers do have agreements with Google about support for their devices and such agreements can very well be for 10+ years or even for lifetime of the devices.
PS: Actually 10 years ago when Windows Phone was a thing Microsoft has tried to make their own YouTube client without agreement with Google and it was killed by Google almost immediately.
Google just dropped all third-party Google Home device support, leaving people with e.g. Lenovo Smart Displays twisting in the wind. It wouldn't be out of character for them to "alter the deal" w.r.t. all those old smart TVs and such.
Yeah, yt-dlp is great. It happily grabs stuff Invidious can't play. Indispensable IMO.
i don’t think it’s weird, but i signed up for the premium trial a few weeks ago and it is simply astounding how much more enjoyable it makes things. i didn’t realize just how awful things had become until i tried youtube without ads.
i know some other folks are complaining about still getting tracked or whatever, but i think the simple truth is that youtube without ads is a vastly superior experience.
The people you watch also make more money per premium view from what I understand
Last I heard, it was in the 10-50x range per view (premium vs. ad supported).
I watch enough YouTube for it to be a no-brainer for me, and I run an ad-blocker pretty much everywhere. Supporting the video creators I watch is worth it.
I signed up when it was first announced as YT Red years ago ("Member since October 29, 2015") and whenever I use a device without being logged in or I'm on an account without premium, I cringe. I can't believe people live that way. And we watch so much YouTube in this house, it's more than worth it for me, plus more cash to the creators.
I wish I got a discount for ALSO subscribing to YTTV and Google One... that'd be nice, but I'm not parting with YT Premium any time soon. It shows I've had > 790 hours of ad-free videos.
I don’t just subscribe to remove ads (yt premium is my only subscription)
It also pays the content creators I watch more money. So imho it’s a win win. No ads for me more money for the peoples content I enjoy
If you've been "poised to give them money for a while" I don't think you were ever actually going to. What was stopping you?
I mean, either way, Youtube comes out ahead. If you're blocking all their ads and not paying a sub, you're just a cost. They're cutting you.
What I don't understand is why you feel entitled to benefit from this resource without supporting it in any way.
I think you are missing the point that Youtube chose to provide this service the way it is, and we are using it as they want.
If you weren’t a paying customer, refuse to become a paying customer, and refuse to watch the ads, they don’t gain anything by having you as a user. It only costs them to retain you.
If doing something as simple as asking you to hold up your end of the deal of using their website (letting ads load for the ad-supported content) is too much to ask but paying for the website is also too much to ask, you have to be honest that you just want a free experience.
I don’t buy the argument that you were going to pay them in the future but you decided against it because they wouldn’t let you have it for free.
I don’t do the ads on desktop but tolerate them on mobile. If they push me off the habit altogether, they’ll lose that second half of ads.
I used to be fine with the ads. But two breaks for a five minute video is unacceptable. I hope they fail if this is what they think is okay.
They also advertise fraudulent stuff all the time now. They don’t care. They’re just desperate for money.
It would be silly to assign some sort of morality argument to the other half of it when they behave so poorly with the ads.
I wouldn't argue that the ads are terrible but it's what you agreed to by using an ad supported service. If you don't like their ad selection, the only ethical choice is either to pay for Premium or stop using YouTube. Watching someone's work without paying them isn't fair to the creators and it's a great way to ensure the market moves to worse content which is cheaper to produce.
I’m unmoved by the creators angle. Google exploits creators too. It’s best to just give them money more directly (like Patreon) than give Google money and hope they forward the creators a sensible amount.
If Google wants me off their service because I don’t watch enough ads, that’s their call. I’m not going to make a hufflepuff about it. But their ad game is garbage.
I’m not saying they’re great, but it’s a known quantity: you watch ads, advertisers pay Google, they pay creators. Yes, too much of that goes to the middleman but that’s a reason not to participate at all.
I had an issue with my payment for premium which resulted in temporary suspension of my service. A few days after fixing the payment issue, this news came out.
Considering this with the recent price increase, and some trouble with my family plan, my initial reaction was quite negative towards YouTube. They are setting a very clear trend against what I want in their service with recent changes (Removing downvote, removing android shortcuts and other features, aggressive copyright stiking policies, aggressive promotion of shorts, terrible recommendations).
I am considering cancelling. However, a more optimistic view would be that their ad block policy could result in lower subscription fees with more ad and subscription revenue.
That's crazy, the same thing happened to me. I was like what? Suddenly now my price has increased when I was on YouTube Red for the longest time. Considering canceling too
> they don’t gain anything by having you as a user.
Every minute someone watches them is a minute that they aren't watching a potential competitor
In this sense, having a free tier at all is effective to suffocate competition, even if most users enable adblock
This has always been the case over in the world of freemium games.
The vast majority of the playerbase (70~80%?) are Free2Players (F2Pers), while the rest are whales (paying players) and an even smaller subset of them are space whales who spend enough in a month to buy a luxury car or two.
The games go to great lengths to retain those F2Pers because they are the ones the whales and space whales play together with and/or against. No F2Pers, no whales, no game, no business.
I think YouTube should take a similar approach and try to extract more from high value users to cover the costs of low value users. It’ll be easier to get a few thousand extra dollars from a music fan by bundling live interaction/events into YouTube than squeezing more ads into the bottom 1%.
> Every minute someone watches them is a minute that they aren't watching a potential competitor
Actually, they would prefer if all of the ad-blocking, refuse-to-pay customers would spend a lot of time on their competitor's websites.
In that case, why don't they allow competitors to host their videos?
I took the parent's comment to mean they would rather 'free' viewers leech off other people's bandwidth, as if they're not Premium and not watching ads, they are just consuming bandwidth and costing resources.
If they go to a competitor and block ads and consume bandwidth, then they are actively costing the competitor rather than costing Youtube for hosting.
Youtube allowing competitors to host would just consume youtube's bandwidth but with the 'views' also going to the competitor's domain (so the competitor could then potentially get additional sponsor support for having 'eyeballs' on their domain).
My point is that they intentionally obtained an effective monopoly on content, so it's weird of them to complain about too many people wanting to watch content there.
How exactly did they obtain a monopoly on content? They don't name most content creators sign exclusivity agreements.
I said an effective monopoly. Most people who create a video will automatically upload it to YouTube without even thinking about alternatives.
Ehh the problem with this is that I don't block YT ads (I watch on a tablet), but I am still constantly bombarded (and I mean that) with full-page click-through ads, banners and in-feed blocks trying to get me to buy Premium.
YouTube, I'm watching your pre-roll and mid-roll ads like you want me to, so leave me the fuck alone with this premium shit, I'm not interested.
So it's not an "either-or" scenario.. If you are using the ad-supported experience, they still disrupt it (many times a session for me) with UI-interfering elements to try to convert you. And that sucks.
You can still block ads on a tablet if you use Firefox (Android only) or Brave.
That’s a big IF
Nobody prevents you from doing so…
What? Buying an Android tablet only to gain the ability to block ads?
Yup, nobody's stopping you, except yourself.
You are literally correct, but spending money on a whole new device just for this single feature doesn’t feel sound. Especially when under a budget.
So while you are correct, such investment would be irresponsible (in my case). In other words, responsibility is what’s stopping me.
I use vinegar on Iphone and it blocks youtube ads in safari.
They're advertising their own product on their own platform. What's wrong with that?
I never said that them advertising their product was the problem. Please read more carefully.
If they advertised it with regular in-video ads like the rest of the ads, sure no problem, I am used to sitting through those and I accept ads as part of a good free viewing experience..
But they constantly interfere with the standard UI layout and experience to push these repetitive intrusive ads on me, that I have closed probably hundreds of times.
They should know by now that I am not going to sign up for it, so why continue to degrade the experience for me, when I am watching their ads as a free user?
They don't do this on the website so don't tell me "that's part of the trade" because it's only in the app they do this so aggressively and repeatedly.
>... you have to be honest that you just want a free experience.
No, I want an experience that commits to showing the ad(s) up front and not interrupting the video with more ads in the middle.
I use YT primarily for music. I don't mind letting ads play at the beginning. It's when they inject them into the middle of a song and, suddenly, when I'm jamming out, RIGHT at the peak of the track when I'm having the most fun, two more ads suddenly start blaring, and I'm forced to let the first one ride for 30 seconds.
There is some music that you just can't easily access anywhere but on YT for a variety of reasons. It's what keeps me using YT, but that approach of ad injection is bullshit.
Edit: Concert videos, too. Their algorithm will slap ads in the middle of a song, rather than in between them. I absolutely would not mind an ad here and there between songs, but noooooo.
> No, I want an experience that commits to showing the ad(s) up front and not interrupting the video with more ads in the middle.
Of course you would, and of course YT and its creators earns significantly more if they show ad in the middle. Not 100% sure, but AFAIK content creator could disable ad in the middle if they want to.
>... creators...
Most of what I'm talking about are concerts and music uploaded to YT by fans.
It absolutely does not cost them to retain you. That’s a joke. The current model completely offsets the number of users with ad-blockers by such a margin it’s silly we’re even talking about it.
The only reason we are talking about it is because shareholders want the money printer to go brrrrrr. YouTube IS profitable. Can we stop pretending one of the richest companies in the world needs me to stop blocking their ads for any reason other than greed?
And that principle is what most people balking here have a problem with.
They gain a lot thanks to network effects. Non-paying customers contribute to viewing numbers and engagement (likes + comments + subscriptions). But most importantly, they bring others to the platform by sharing links to videos and discussing them with others.
See [1]:
> In 2013, the boss of Time-Warner (which owns HBO), Jeff Bewkes, declared that piracy was: “Better than an Emmy” because more people watching the show inevitably led to more people deciding to pay for subscriptions.
[1]: https://theconversation.com/game-of-thrones-for-hbo-piracy-i...
Public goodwill is a thing. Also, their offer was lackluster. But with Youtube Music being a part of Premium and getting better and better overtime, more and more people are actually on the lookout for signing up. There's also a psychological aspect of it. Remember how it feels when you're just about to do something and someone told you that you have to do it? Taking the agency and initiative away tend to annoy people and have an adverse effect on the task. You might not be personally affected by it but it's a common thing.
> more and more people are actually on the lookout for signing up
Supposedly they have over 80 million subscribers so they're definitely not hurting[0].
I am interested in seeing what happens if/when over 50% of users in the US subscribe to it. Advertisers are losing out on probably their biggest consumer market: people with enough money to handle a $12/mo subscription. Perhaps advertising income will start to shrink $12 for each user that subs to Premium?
0: https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/09/youtube-music-and-premium-...
No, they're just going to move the goalpost. Once everyone is on board with subbing to YT, and they have enough revenue. They'll reintroduce ads because that's just leaving money on the table.
>you have to be honest that you just want a free experience.
yes.
> If you weren’t a paying customer, refuse to become a paying customer, and refuse to watch the ads, they don’t gain anything by having you as a user. It only costs them to retain you.
It helps yt achieve their mission /s
Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world.
We believe that everyone deserves to have a voice, and that the world is a better place when we listen, share and build community through our stories.
My $25/mo for life youtubetv subscription is now up to $80/mo. I'm regretting that now, but also kind of stuck because I have family members on the account.
I'm definitely not signing up for youtube premium.
Totally different service, also what does 25 for life mean? Did they promise that somewhere?
I don’t pay for it because it’s pointless when you can use an ad blocker. This change would flip the situation.
Mate, Youtube have existed for almost 2 decades and you probably used them for most of it. I have used it to watch countless hours of lectures, talks, interviews and entertainment. You probably have the same experience of it for the past 2 decade too.
If you are not going to pay for THAT, you aren't going to pay for ANYTHING. Just admit you want free stuff. Stop deluding yourself into thinking that Youtube is somehow responsible for hosting all these for free.
Google set the standard for free online videos. It's what they used to aggressively drive other competitors out of the market. Now they want to reap the "benefits" of market dominance.
Yeah, I had this discussion with someone recently. Companies of that size can drown out competition for years, decades even, by operating at a loss (or just not making much profit at all) because they have numerous revenue streams and the pre-existing highly-profitable sources can subsidize the not-so-profitable new one. Once you have a nice big customer base, tighten the screws and wring money out of the users now that they are captive. The rate at which that process occurs varies, but it's basically inevitable, especially for publicly-traded corps.
There are tons of Youtube competitors that you can use right now. You're not though, because Youtube is better.
Yes, because they can afford to operate at a loss to starve out those competitors....
Noone uses youtube because "it's better"(in what way even?). Everyone uses youtube because it's pretty much the only place for pre-filmed video content these days. If all content creators I watch moved to other sites, I would watch them there. I don't 'watch youtube', I watch people/channels that I follow. They've built a monopoly and now they're abusing it. I would gladly pay some low yearly subscription for Youtube without ads, but their current price is borderline insane, especially since most people won't use most of the features offered, all we want is an ad-free experience, I couldn't care less for Youtube Music. Until then, I will continue watching it via 3rd party sideloaded apps on my TV and with uBlock in web browser. Stop white-knighting corporations worth billions of dollars, they don't care for you as much as you care for them.
> Feels like I've been poised to give them money for a while
Pay for it or don't, but what is this nonsense about being poised (for a while) to maybe someday possibly consider thinking about purchasing the service?
It's $13. (In inflation-adjusted terms that's $7.12 the year I graduated high school.) What in the world are we talking about here? Buy it or don't. What is there to think about?
I just checked it's $15.99, which is a no go for me at the moment. If they offered a lower cost tier without YouTube music I would do it. However I use pandora (plus), I have for over a decade and have all my stations setup how I want them so I have no need for YouTube music. I mostly use the app anyways on my phone or tablet, so I still get ads. So it's not a big deal, but I do feel that $15.99 is to much at least for me at the moment, considering I pay for pandora and a few other streaming services.
Edit: Just realized I was viewing through the app with the Apple tax markup. However $13 is still more then ideal when I'll never use YouTube Music
Some people have been known to temporarily "move to Turkey" during signup.
That gives you an annual individual plan for $15usd p.a.
My big problem with paying for Youtube is I have a workspace account for my personal domain. None of their services inter-operate with workspace services. For example, our Google Home. My wife cannot register her voice with the system because she has a 'google account' not an account on my workspace. Because of this, our Home will regularly deny her the ability to listen to "age restricted" podcasts about cooking (they sometimes swear omg). Similarly, if I pay for Youtube, I cannot "share with my family" unless they are also on my workspace.
Clearly, the solution is for me to create another google account to use for these services and only use my workspace account for one thing. But then why am I paying Google to host my workspace account? Should I pay them _MORE_ for my wife and children to also be on my workspace, as well as paying for Youtube? (don't worry, I'm working on migrating off workspaces too).
(and fwiw, I paid for youtube premium for years, and watch hours of youtube content a day)
Gsuite for personal use is and has always been very very half baked. To answer your question. I pay for it too but I also ask myself the same question as to why I don't just move my domain to a simpler service that'll host an email.
But yes, the solution is definitely having a separate private gmail for those services.
I moved to Outlook with a Microsoft 365 subscription after I found out you could have a custom domain tied to your email (via GoDaddy only, but you can still do it with the right DNS entries) and then made my Google account a free Gmail account.
I got way too sick of getting features months, or even years later, than consumer Google accounts. I wish they would offer a paid tier for Google/Gmail accounts that would allow one custom domain for email.
Happy to plug Fastmail as a happy customer!
Their spam filtering is trash. Every day I get 1-2 obvious scam/spam emails. On the worst days I get 5+. I’ve been a customer for a year and I mark the spam as such with discipline and it has never caught on to what is spam. I’m at my limit and seriously considering going back to Workspace.
That's wild, and a bit disappointing to hear. My spam protection has been top-notch. Perhaps because it's a custom domain with very little traffic. Also I mask everything with 1Password which has been nothing but good too.
Invidious is a third-party frontend (you can self-host) that solves this problem: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
As a bonus, it is super fast because it doesn't have to justify the salaries of dozens (hundreds?) of frontend developers and can get away with server-side-rendered HTML and minimal amounts of Javascript.
Does YouTube get any money from this for their infrastructure costs?
Their CEO just got hundreds of millions of dollars as a bonus. I don't think their infrastructure costs are that big of a worry for them.
Probably not but looks like this Invidious "doesn't scale".
I think you can be pretty sure that if Google doubles down on this, third party clients (as well as downloaders like yt-dlp) will stop working.
Not so fast, at least. IIRC youtube have contracts to keep API stable for a number of years for TV applications.
This has already started, as I found out when my plugin for OSMC stopped working. Here's what YouTube has to say about apps:
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/12318250?hl=en
Of course, this cat-and-mouse game has been going on since forever, so I wonder if the next step will be downloading ads and then not showing them.
Your bonus is my primary reason for using the service. Invidious, old.reddit.com, Gmail HTML Mode, are perfect examples of the great user experiences we've lost in the pursuit for New Shiny. Directly comparable with their "modern" counterparts. It would be nice if websites started to offer a cut-down version as an option, especially for users in 3rd world countries.
Is there a browser extension to switch to lightweight versions of web apps like these?
Yep, check out LibRedirect: https://github.com/libredirect/browser_extension
The hero we need
The reddit redesign was just downright horrible and for some reason it’s stayed and we all have to live with it.
You can set to use old.reddit.com in account preferences, and I haven't seen new redesign since I reinstalled windows. That being said, the day the redesign gets pushed off, thats the day I stop using reddit.
old.reddit.com works very poorly on mobile.
There used to be i.reddit.com, for that purpose, but they removed it a month ago or so… I wonder how long old.reddit.com will remain.
Well, I don't want to sound too cynical, but the whole internet works poorly on mobile.
Users have less control over their OS and browser so the experience is much shittier even if you ignore styling which isn't sized for mobile.
If you don't care about logging into Reddit, you can try Libreddit or Teddit as read-only frontends. Bonus is you can use them without JS if that's a concern to you. Libreddit especially works better on mobile IMO
Of course these will probably only work until reddit changes their API, as they announced recently
on mobile I use "Reddit is fun" app and I gotta say its actually better to browse than old reddit on PC
Another alternative is Piped. https://piped.kavin.rocks. Comes with sponsorblock in addition to not showing ads. For Android users, use Youtube ReVanced if you want algorithm recommendations, NewPipe if not.
NewPipe is great. I haven't tried ReVanced in a few months because it was a bit buggy. Has it improved?
Been using revanced (and just vanced) for years and never encountered a bug. What problems have you had?
Piped works great! However it is let down by the (IMO) poor UX design. I would love for some graphics designer to step-in a create more usable CSS stylesheets for it.
Seems pretty slow actually. Also the search is poor, the player is buggy, and some videos wouldn’t play at all because of format issues.
Seemed fast enough to me, from the one instance I tried (inv.riverside.rocks).
You really have to self-host those services if you want adequate performance. All the public instances are overloaded.
Noone seeing the obvious connection to Manifest v3?
"Oh, it appears with the new Chrome extension API it is impossible to write an adblocker that bypasses this. How could that have happened? Google told us they only have our best interests in mind, so this must've been by accident."
Maybe people wouldn't be locking your ads if you didn't have them jacked up to saturation level. I sometimes watch on a console and the number of ads is ridiculous, even worse than broadcast TV. Sometimes you get ads in the middle of songs.
Let's be real --- ad blockers don't have a setting to let through one ad every 30 minutes.
I agree the number of ads is absolutely shocking, which I'm reminded every time I see someone else play youtube, as I've had a subscription for about as many years as it's been available. My time is absolutely worth more than whatever I'm paying to skip these ads.
I whitelisted Youtube for a long time because the ads were not that intrusive. Then something changed and I chose my sanity over their business model.
From what I’ve seen YouTube actually has fewer ads than broadcast TV and the ads are mostly shorter. It just seems like they have more because of the timing.
Broadcast TV generally syncs the ads with act breaks in the show. YouTube generally doesn’t seem to do any syncing with the content, so ads can suddenly happen in the middle of someone speaking. That’s way more disruptive.
I keep forgetting people still live in countries where people watch broadcast tv.
They’re trying to bring them into streaming too but I refuse to watch something with ads on a paid service
YouTube generally doesn’t seem to do any syncing with the content
No, this is wrong. They can detect pauses and typically slot ads between songs or during applause moments. I don't watch a lot of TV but most days share some family time where we catch news, weather, and some chat show fluff, so I regularly watch some short programs that I tolerate rather than like. If I'm bored by the comedian, I amuse myself by predicting when the ad will come in. I don't think YT even needs o analyze the content as such, they can go by the user behavior: on some clients, when you seek in the video it shows you a graph of most/least favored time offsets based on aggregated play times, so they can easily time ad breaks to fit where people stop watching or skip ahead, and they line up neatly with segment changes. This kind of advertising is a bit intrusive but merely annoying. But when listening to music and being served inappropriate/poorly timed ad selections, it's truly infuriating.
Insuper, Vendo delenda est
It's incredible how many people go "I was almost ready to give them money" whilst using Youtube all the time with an ad blocker. I know it, I was one of them for years.
Just buy the subscription. You get the free trial for a month. Nothing changes, the money is not missed, but you actually pay for something you use a lot.
The biggest benefit is not being subjected to ads anymore just by being next to family members who don't use ad blockers. It comes with four slots for family members.
IIRC YouTube Premium also comes with YouTube Music, which coming from a former Google Music user, the plan was a no-brainer.
If YT Music great? Well, no but it's fine. It has my music, podcasts and decent recommendation algorithm. Paired that with commerical free YT and it's a stellar offer.
I quit when they switched because I hated YT music so much. Switched to Spotify, and cut out the YT subscription entirely. I watch a lot less YT now.
It was definitely nowhere ready when the transition happened, but they've been constantly working on it for the past few years, unlike GPM which was mostly stuck for years. While it still has a few issues, there's a ton of cool features GPM never had either.
Why? Does Google need to be making a higher profit than it already does? Does YouTube deserve the extra money? For what reason should we pay?
Why does it need to be justified? It’s their product and they are entitled to block ad blockers.
Either watch ads, buy the subscription, or stop using YouTube.
They're allowed to block ad blockers and people are allowed to circumvent those blocks.
Are they actually making money off youtube? I almost doubt it. In any case I feel it might help to work against the shittification of the internet. Or maybe it doesn't, but at least it feels right.
If you are watching YouTube then yes, it is a useful service that has some monetary value.
> If you are watching YouTube then yes, it is a useful service that has some monetary value.
Huh? They asked if it deserves more money. Not if it deserves money.
Well, yes it clearly deserves a little more money each time it renders a valuable service at nonzero operational cost. Duh.
Please look at the earlier comment again. "More" here is a synonym for higher profit. More money per view.
But the context of this discussion is whether you should be allowed to watch YouTube without any ads. So that's a baseline of zero money per view.
I think they're averaging over all viewers.
But also even for one individual that allowed ads, youtube premium is a huge increase to how much money youtube gets.
Need? No, not particularly. Deserve? Yes, they are providing a service.
They already make a profit from the service. I'm asking why I should provide them more than what they're already making. I believe their profit already gives them as much as they deserve for the service they render to society.
Content creators get paid as well, but I don't think you care about that either.
You just want to have the cake and eat it I guess, which is fine as well.
I do care about that! But YouTube, the one profiting from those creators, should be the one paying creators more, from their already very high profits. Not me.
Does everyone really use it a lot?
I might watch one or two a month, that's it. I will always prefer written content over video. The only time I go for video is when I can't find a written source.
With that little use it will not be worthwhile.
Haha, yeah if not using it I wouldn't get the subscription either. After subscribing they actually provide a little page of "Premium benefits enjoyed so far" listing the amount of hours spent watching.
For me it says > 120 hours and I have had the subscription for 4 months. So definitely making use of it.
Nice try YouTube
YouTube is by no means the primary reason I run my ad blocker. That it works on YouTube is a side bonus, mostly useful if I need to watch something in an incognito window or while I'm signed into my work account. I pay for Premium on my main account mostly to support the creators. (The good ones tend to do the Patreon thing, and I much prefer to chip in there given the choice, but not everyone on YT does that.)
Fully agree with you there. I can't use the internet without an ad blocker.
I hate ads and use an ad blocker, but I also pay for ad removal on any site I use regularly that offers the option (which includes YouTube).
This seems like a reasonable balance between having the internet be usable while also supporting the services I use.
I will, if they will stop tracking my every move.
But they won't, and I won't stop blocking their trackers either.
I shouldn't be stalked 24/7 to sell ads.
> The biggest benefit is not being subjected to ads anymore
Until they have reached a critical mass of subscribed users, and they start serving ads to paid users too (à la Netflix)
i’m an edge case: my computers are amnesiac: if i wanted to watch YT Premium, i’d have to log in again every morning. i have an old Google account, but it was setup with 2FA (TOTP) and Google’s made that login method as burdensome as they can to push users to prefer their apps. even if it were easy to login, i prefer to be logged out so that i don’t get sucked into those godawful YT comment arguments.
i watch a couple 5-minute YT videos each day: sure, i’d happily pay 10x whatever they make from me in ads, but there’s no way they could implement that in a way which doesn’t worsen my experience overall. not to mention the whole angle of providing Google with my undeniable legal name.
If I pay for premium, will that also remove all the in-video promotions and calls for smacking like and subscribe?
That would be a good deal. Now we are sandwiched between ads both inside videos and between them, and they act surprised people use ad-blockers.
We first get adverts. And gee-golly-whillikers, they're also malware vendors and other terribvle horrible nogood crap you just don't want. And exploits. So yeah, you block ads with Ublock Origin.
Some shit site gets the idea to "block adblock". Detects a few common ones. But disabling javascript almost always works. But annoying.
So http://reek.github.io/anti-adblock-killer/#filterlist is created. And it "anti-block adblock" is here. And works well.
By the time the chumps make "anti-anti-block adblock", we'll neuter that as well.
The endgame is something terrible like a WebAssembly that does forced downloads to get the content you want all in a VM like thing. That's what Widevine is already doing, kind of. Im just surprised that more for-profit news/media companies aren't doing exactly that, since now you have to pop off the payload in a container and try to detect what an ad is and isnt.
As an aside: If you're running Firefox, download Sponsorblock. It skips over the shit in-video adverts on Youtube with "a message from our sponsor". Oh, and you dont get this even IF you pay youtube.
What's next, "YouTube tests pausing videos when you look away from ads"?
This is a slippery slope that I definitely do not want to be going down. At that rate, "drink verification can" is not far off.
When I used to watch the actual TV I changed the channel, muted, or left the room during ads. My eyes, my ears, my brain. I will not be forced to consume.
I work in adtech, we're getting into eye tracking for verifying ad viewership on smart TVs. So.. yeah.
Jesus Christ.
I don’t understand. Why would my smart TV have a camera?
I’m not going to put on pants to watch TV.
Just like you can't buy a dumb TV with a high-end panel now; eventually, you won't be able to buy a smart TV without a built in camera.
You can always buy black masking tape to put over a fixed camera.
Something $0.01 piece of tape will easily fix :)
Microphones are a lot harder to block though.
What if in the future, when you block the camera of your smart TV, whatever you're watching stops playing?
Given that’s basically what YouTube is experimenting with, it seems highly likely.
It goes flying out the window or back to the store, depending on mood.
Hmm good point. But I no longer watch live TV anyway. I'm done with that, I don't even have a connection to it anymore. And if streaming services start doing that I'll just download everything.
The problem really is the microphones, basically impossible to spot and block.
Yes. What I've done with my ring cameras was open them up and remove the microphones altogether (or in one case cut the cable to them).
They were able to hear my speak literally in the next room even covered in tape :P I don't mind video of my front door ending up in Amazon's cloud but I don't want my audio going there 24/7.
They're called computer monitors.
Ah yes...I'm sure 52" LED 120Hz monitors are super affordable.
The difference is that having a computer attached to the TV provides significant value to the customer. When people came into BestBuy they’d ask “Does this TV have Netflix?”
I don’t see a built in camera driving that kind of consumer behavior. What feature would they come in and ask for that requires a camera?
The spying with a SmartTV is also hidden and and hard to imagine. A camera on the TV in their bedroom though? They’ll both notice that and understand that it sees them naked.
With Smart TVs if there are two TVs on a shelf, one with “Netflix installed” and one without, I can see people preferring the TV with Netflix.
With cameras if there are two TVs on a shelf, one with a camera and one without, I see people leaving the camera on the shelf almost every time.
You bring up an excellent point. There is no value add for the consumer. Problem is, that having a built in camera will be too great of a value add for the manufacturers selling your eyeballs.
All the better to watch you with...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen
That old Soviet Russia joke has truly become reality, and it is quite disturbing.
Thank you for your honesty, but do you really wish you were working on something less predatory?
From my experience: yes, all the time.
Also don't work in insurance, it can be real depressing.
Thank you for this information. I just find it amusing that instead of calling it "Big Brother telescreen" just calling it "Smart TV" made everyone comfortable with the technology : we are all smart, right?
As they say: just because you are paranoid, it does not mean that they are not after you.
Drink a verification can.
How does it feel to work on tech to spy on people?
Isn't slippery slope a logical fallacy? Let's wait until Google does something actually insane before claiming that what they're doing is insane.
It's only a fallacy if you don't have past behaviour to justify your predictions.
If you take the slippery slope fallacy too far, you'd never be able to notice trends at all.
Google is like climate change - they keep pushing for more money, and ruining the experience for their users. There's no reason to expect this to stop. It's not a slippery slope.
Are you saying that the slippery slope is a slippery slope? If so, I am delighted.
(edited to clarify my delight. My intent isn't to fan the flames of fallacy finger pointing.)
My current Twitch ad blocking solution merely mutes the stream while the ad plays, that's good enough for me. In the end we might have to settle for only muting and hiding the ads in a way that the source cannot detect, but it's better than the alternative.
On a related note as someone who uses YouTube constantly YouTube Premium is absolutely worth it.
Yeah. Subscribed as soon as my kid got old enough to use it
Yeah, and YT Music is included too right? Because I have YT Music and no ads and it's really cheap compared to other services. I pay COP$17900 which is little less than USD$4. I used to pay around USD$10 for Spotify.
> Yeah, and YT Music is included too right?
Correct and I believe YT Music pays much more per listen than Spotify to the artist.
What makes it worth it? Isn't the experience the same as just running an ad-blocker?
I don't run an adblocker on my phone, YouTube Music is included and the creators still get paid.
The main reason they get paid is that their income is primarily from sponsorships and affiliate links now. Youtube premium doesn't block that, and it's a much more insidious kind of ad.
It makes you think you're watching somebody being authentic, when really it's a business disguising itself as an authentic person that's trying to sell you things (whether out of bias or strategy)
I usually stick with known quantities and avoid any scummy looking channel.
I have no problem watching the in video Gamer Nexus ads and don't expect paying for YouTube premium to skip those ads.
Creators get paid MORE per stream by a premium user than an ad free user.
You can watch on all of your devices, even the ones where setting up an ad-blocker is non trivial or impossible.
It is pretty trivial on every device I have used. Which ones are a challenge?
How about a smart TV, a streaming stick/box (e.g. Roku, Amazon Fire Stick), or a games console?
Pi-hole will work for some types of ad on all devices, but I'm not sure how it'd work for video ads in an app like YouTube - particularly if Google started serving the ads from the same servers as the content.
In theory, but you actually help the creators you enjoy watching.
I subscribe to their Patreons, thank you very much.
YT Premium only makes the problem worse by requiring you to log in using an account that is tied to your real world identity and was used for payment processing. You just end up giving more data points to Google to track you, cross-reference with other sources and shove more ads in other platforms, still get native ads, and Google can just add their own ads later (as it is happening step by step with streaming companies).
The flip side s that you don't have to use Chrome+Google for everything. I buy ebooks and watch youtube on it, plus my phone (so I buy android apps via the same google account). And Gmail is my fallback email account so that doesn't see much traffic.
I use 3-4 browsers and because WFH + VM's for coding some incidental sandboxing.
Well, my hubby’s iPad and our iPhones don’t support ad blocking on YouTube, nor does my Smart TV, so…ad blocking only works on 1/5 of my husband’s devices and my own would actually be effective with ad blocking, for one…
(And before you say ‘just switch to Android’, I’m an iOS/WatchOS dev and a music producer for a living - if anything with the recent announcement of Logic on the iPad, I’ll be buying another iPads not reducing them…)
Vinegar for iOS has made YouTube much less obnoxious https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...
Install Brave for ad blocking YouTube on iOS.
Actually better, because I share it with my family and no one has to deal with installing / configuring adblockers on different platforms (mobile app, TV, laptops whatever) It also includes Music so together I think it is a pretty good deal. Prices in some countries are ridiculously cheap as well (<$2 monthly in India, Turkey) , but of course that could change in time.
My only problem is the sponsored content in youtube videos, I would give some extra money to skip that crap as well.
My main issue is the tracking, if youtube premium stopped the awful tracking i would be fine, but it doesn't.
I had YouTube Family at $15/month until this month, when they raised the price to $23. I signed up back when Google Play Music was still a thing.
I was never able to get into YouTube Music, though, so I don't actually use it to stream my music. The fact that my playlists are shared between YouTube and YouTube Music is enough for me to drop it from serious consideration as a music streaming service on its own. That, plus the lack of lossless streaming, inconsistent, clunky UI, and lack of any positive features that distinguish it from Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music, is why I never used it for anything other than sharing songs with people who didn't use Tidal.
That they apparently also include ads in the albums I transferred from Google Play Music - albums that I paid for - is just added insult.
The main way I justified paying the subscription was that other people in my household got access to ad-free music streaming (and they actually used it, unlike me), Youtubers get comped more from me watching their videos, and I didn't have to worry about whole-home adblockers to remove ads from the app. But after a 50% price hike that takes it above the prices for Tidal Family ($15), Apple Music Family ($17), and Spotify Family ($16), it's not something I can justify anymore.
(Youtube Music Family is $15, FWIW, but it doesn't include Youtube itself.)
> That, plus the lack of lossless streaming, inconsistent, clunky UI, and lack of any positive features that distinguish it from Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music, is why I never used it for anything other than sharing songs with people who didn't use Tidal.
The UX and performance of the YouTube Music web client is so much worse than the old Google Music web client. I used to be able to scroll my entire album collection without a hiccup on Google Music, that's now impossible with YouTube Music
I'm still incredibly salty about this as well.
I don't like paying a platform that rose to prominence because of piracy, just so that I can watch IP created by other people without youtube inserting a really intense number of ads into the experience. And all the vidoes are ads anyway, it's just via sponsorships and affiliate links now.
It feels deeply icky
> I don't like paying a platform that rose to prominence because of piracy
Is that true? Yeah it's there, more so in the past, but I have to imagine that was a tiny amount of their viewership. I'd imagine most viewing is from individual channels of real people.
Pirated shows are still a mainstay. I watch pirate ufc content often, and its not even hard to find.
can you link a specific example? youtube's anti-piracy measures are quite strict in my experience.
Is it possible to get YouTube Premium without a credit-card? That is what stopped me from subscribing before.
If you don't pay with a card then what would you pay with?
Probably gift cards like Play Store ones. In fact as it is all Google I think it already could be a thing
Yeah I guess playstore and apple giftcards work
Something that doesn't get Google to ban accounts? Blocking a payment to Google or doing a charge-back is involved in nearly all account closure complaints on this site.
Btw: as someone who's worked in banks, I'd like to point out that there are circumstances where some banks will charge-back automatically (or outright "accept the payment", then not pay), if they suspect fraud for example.
Local payment solutions like iDEAL, Bancontact, Prezelewy24, PayU, AliPay, Klarna or something like PayPal. Or through your mobile phone bill.
Credit-cards are not that common here in Euro-land.
> Credit-cards are not that common here in Euro-land.
But debit cards are, which also work, it's not just credit cards.
In Europe there are a few options which let you pay with your bank account without a credit card. I tried to look up all the things Wise supports, found part of the list:
Trustly, Sofort, IDEAL
IDEAL is huge in the Netherlands for example.
I subscribe with a Debit Card. Works perfectly fine.
HN/Reddit : For years, "I'm happy to pay for services that has no/few ads".
Companies: Here's a ad-free version. Subscribe
HN/Reddit: Why are you asking me to subscribe? I hate this
Except we paid for other streamers for an ad-free experience – until they started inserting ads again. Do we believe that Google of all companies won't pull a switcheroo in a few years?
Not on my dime.
By this kind of hypothetical assumption, you shouldn't pay for anything, as the other party might change the terms in future, or in your parlance, "pull a switcheroo"
Yes, exactly. Brand loyalty is a thing.
youtube premium isn't a contract that punishes cancelling. If you don't like the service stop subscribing.
i don't even hate ads or the idea of targeted advertising in theory but 20+ years into the panopticon and the company that has the most information about my purchasing habits, interests and dislikes still has never shown me any advertising that was even remotely relevant to my life. i still have better odds of seeing something i actually want to buy just by flipping through the paper and those adverts don't demand that i put my life on pause just because corporation x spent a whole lot of money on a branding campaign that is annoying, unfunny and makes me hate them and their products.
I love getting ads for things I've already bought.
Yes, I just bought a mattress, of course I'm interested in getting another one.
Oh, a new fridge! Always good to have a spare! Thanks Google!
Modern internet is absolutely unbearable without adblock.
This somewhat alludes to a question I have wondered for quite a while. Are there any compelling data that digital advertising even works?
Sure, if one clicks on an ad then immediately buys a product, then perhaps that would be more straightforward. However, I just do not think that is very common, but I could be wrong.
It just seems like there is some kind of false notion that if a company creates ads and the company has an increase in sales, then it must be because of the ads, when in reality, it could be entirely coincidental.
Tangental, but I intentionally boycott products that have annoying ads. I will walk to the ends of the Earth before I use GEICO, for example.
Please teach me how I can watch Linus Tech Tips on YouTube without ads with YouTube premium and without installing an extension.
There are several levels of ads on YouTube and paying for YouTube premium only gets rid of one.
Can't speak to this channel specifically, but SponsorBlock works incredibly well, even for medium to smaller-sized channels.
That's an extension.
Really? I don’t think I’ve ever seen an ad on Premium.
Every large youtube channel has sponsorship on it nowadays, it's like 1-2 minute ad segments in every video. Paying for premium doesn't stop that.
No, but it's easy to fast forward through them.
Or just don't watch videos that are littered with sponsors ads and maybe creators will do it less.
Isn't Linus Tech Tips an ad, though? The only times I've looked at it all I've seen is sponsored content with breaks to talk about sponsors and maybe buy some merch. Oh, and exhortations to use their affiliate links. And that's using Premium, I expect that without it the sponsored content would be broken up by youtube's ads.
Maybe my expectations are biased by subscribing to Nebula? And for those who do, Medlife Crisis just posted a fun video on the placebo effect featuring great (fake) sponsor callouts.
Do you consider the whole video to be "an ad" when the sponsor is a shoe company and the video is about a graphics card? I don't.
They do make videos where the entire thing is sponsored by the company whose product is the subject of the video. But it's like one or two a month.
And 5-10 seconds to mention merch is annoying sometimes but doesn't really change the nature of the video.
Press the L button twice when Linus says "just like the segway to our sp.."
There are ads in every video content nowadays. Did you miss the past 10 years or something ?
Keep in mind that HN/Reddit is comprised of thousands or millions of people and there may or may not be overlap between those saying the first thing and later the second.
The rule of thumb according to youtubers is that 1000 video views is worth about $1 of ad share. Youtube's ad share is about 50%, so 1000 video views should be worth about $2 of ad money for Youtube. Youtube Premium costs $12 a month which is equivalent to 6000 video views per month or ~200 video views per day. If I'm on a very youtuby mood I'll maybe watch 10 videos in a day. So, best case scenario, paying for premium comes with a 20x markup.
So your conversation actually goes:
HN/Reddit: "I would love to just give you the money directly instead of watching ads in exchange for advertizers giving you money."
Companies: "Sure, here's the ad-free version. You have to pay 20 times as much as the advertizers do though."
HN/Reddit: "Wait, what? That's bullshit. Why?"
Companies: "Fuck you, that's why."
HN/Reddit: "I would love to just give you the money directly instead of watching ads in exchange for advertissers giving you money."
Companies: "Sure, here's the ad-free version. You have to pay 20 times as much as the advertissers do though."
anticensor: "OK, then; what if I pay the same amount as for the ad-free one, and you show me twice as many ads as before?"
Companies: "OK, deal."
The people willing to pay are the ones advertisers want to reach. Obviously we don't know the breakdown, but it's reasonable to think that advertisers would be willing to spend 20x less per ad if the high value users never saw them.
What, so Google can track me better? I hate YouTube's recommendation system and only watch videos in a Private browsing window. I would happily pay for YouTube if they wouldn't track me, shovel shit in my face, or otherwise misuse my data.
There's a really simple reason for this - HN/Reddit is not one person. It consists of multiple people with different opinions, and as such, there is no singular opinion to be found.
Plot twist: the content is actually not ad-free. (sponsored sections aren't removed from the videos)
I use YouTube infrequently and I still find it worth it. I don't at all mind paying to get rid of ads. But if there is no option to pay, and you try to force ads, I'll choose not using your service instead. An ad-based service is not something I'm interested in.
It seems inferior to a combination of ublock origin and sponsorblock. Unlike using these two, you don't have the option of staying logged out while watching videos without being bombarded by ads.
I'm pretty torn here. I don't believe I deserve access to free content, and there's _nothing_ wrong with any site blocking access if you don't want to see ads.
I've done a lot of digital curtailing in my life, but Youtube has been hard to avoid. It's both good and bad, as they have some of the most amazing content in the whole world, but also some of the most addictive trash that I can't stop watching. Because the service is so addicting, I'm not sure I could justify paying for it, even though the value it brings is incredible.
consuming content for free where creators expect to get paid is polite way of stealing if you really think about it
Generating money by forcing ads to be shown on someone else's device, using the power and internet connection that they pay for, is also stealing if you really think about it.
Very similar to cryptojacking malware.
In my country a publisher is liable for anything they say unless they have a license, and the license require that they abide to local laws. Youtube do not do this since they think they do not need to follow those laws, nor do they take responsibility for anything they publish (including advertisement). They don't even pay value gain taxes when selling this content in return for the service of me watching the ad.
I will respect their expectations when they respect mine.
That sounds pretty bleak, honestly. While you can disagree with Youtube and its policies, the idea of open free speech should appear, at first blush, more important than strict protections against libel or hate speech.
The kind of speech that is limited would be things like publishing malware, or doing illegal advertisement. No advertisement to kids, no alcohol, no tobacco, no prescription medicine, no guns, and no fraudulent messages.
Taxes is also pretty much defined by the expectation of compensation. If a speaker talks on a conferences and get paid to do so, they will need to pay taxes. They have as much open free speech they can get, but they are not free to demand compensation for it without paying taxes.
-google ads before the video -google ads after the video -google ads DURING the video, if it's too long. -At least one "this video sponsored by our sponsor, sponsor sponsor".
There's a limit to how many ads I'm willing to sit through to watch someone tell me why Harbor Freight tools are [The Greatest Thing Ever || Worthless Garbage]
No, if you really think about it, that’s not remotely true here. A creator — myself included — is paid by Google for their content, which Google uses to attract the eyeballs that the advertisers are paying them to serve ads to… the creator doesn’t actually have any interest (financial or otherwise) in whether or not those ads are actually being watched (as opposed to being served). Since virtually all creators rely on non-Google-served advertising income streams (PayPal, merch, sponsorships, etc) for their real income, and invasive ads merely impede that, anything that Google does to drive people to ad blockers really just hurts creators. No stealing is occurring.
This is some truly incredible mental gymnastics.
No gymnastics required at all.
I produce media and I sell it to Google. Google in turn produces an interested audience for that media and sells their views to advertisers in the form of ads served. Advertising agencies in turn produce ads to sell to (for example) GM… GM is the ONLY party with a material interest in the ad actually being viewed by the (potential) consumer, as they’re the only party who can convert my media into a GM vehicle being sold. If anyone in that chain can consider an ad blocker theft, it’s GM… that’d still be wrong, of course, for the same reason ignoring a billboard on the freeway isn’t theft.
When you lay a trap and your prey refuses to be caught they aren’t harming you.
I support my creators directly. Few if any make enough from youtube to produce videos. All are either sponsored or patreon supported.
I thought about it more and realized it wasn't stealing.
What do we do now?
Many of the creators I listen to sell their content, and when they do, I pay for it if I can. (some do not sell their content on a service which allows for non-DRM audio purchases.)
Can you list some of the amazing content you like?
Not OP, but off the top of my head:
- Vlad Vexler
- Reporting from Ukraine
- Real Engineering
- Mustard
- Half as Interesting
- Coffeezilla
I mean the reality is that YT has high quality content for almost any subject matter you can think of. That’s the beauty of the platform, you can find your niche. Hell, it’s even good for most things that pop into your head, podcast clips, old commercials, instruction manuals, DIY etc etc.
Several of these are on Nebula [1], for what it's worth.
[1] https://nebula.tv
Nebula lacks comments and live streaming.
This is a pro in most cases haha.
Some of the best chess tutorials and commentaries, music from favorite bands?
I listen to a LOT of amateur music on Youtube. This probably won't be most people's fancy, but I consider this to be the best performance of this particular song which exists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ6-8IIuJnc
There's a lot on Youtube like this. Music which is either just a cover, or is original that you literally can't find anywhere else because some hobbyist threw it up there and then stopped performing years ago.
There are also plenty of amazing lectures. I'm about halfway through this Yale course, but need to get back to watching it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo-YL-lv3RY&list=PLh9mgdi4rN...
Have you tried deleting your watch history so that the "bad" content srops being suggested to you?
I have and it did not seem to help at all.
All this does is reset the bad content. The only way to really master youtube is to block recommendations, which can be done with uBlock Origin.
On a related note, I hate how A/B testing has become an excuse to aggravate a subsegment of your customer base to 'quantify' a feature or service.
Getting an adblocker denied message on youtube to determine exactly how much YT can annoy you in the service of stuffing more ads into your videos is both actively user-hostile and very definitely evil.
In most medical research, there are all types of consents that are required before you get subjected to this.
They are going to start an arms race. This will likely lead to much further advances in ad-blocking that would be a bad outcome for them. This is a balancing act for sure. I guess they must see lots of people blocking ads to think it's worth while going for it. This could even be a smaller team looking at bumping up their metrics or hit perf goals without seeing the larger impact across the company.
Google is big, wealthy, and tech-savvy enough to, at the very least, make ad blockers unreliable and annoying most of the time for most of the users.
This is not good news, and it's probably not going to be a lesson in humility for the company.
The fact that they control Chrome should scare everyone.
That ship has already sailed with manifest v3, which cripples ad blockers.
And doing anything with Chrome to undermine people will not only harm them in this ad-blocking race, but also cause them to lose massive market share in the browsers... They won't do that. They're not that dumb.
Chrome has no effective competition in the browser market, so Google has no need to worry about market share.
Firefox's user base has shrunk to the point where it's barely relevant. (And I say this as a user myself.) Beyond that, Mozilla currently needs to follow Google's lead just to stay alive. They rely on Google financially, and need to keep up with Chrome's features to maintain what market share they have left.
Brave and the like could be easily killed off by taking Chrome closed-source. Microsoft would probably strike a deal to keep Edge alive. I doubt Safari supports extensions, and Apple wouldn't have any qualms about pulling a few to keep the peace with Google.
Getting us out of this will be difficult. Barring Google returning to their old slogan, the only option I can see is a move to a new set of standards. Hopefully things will move back towards decentralization as peoples' technical literacy increases.
> Firefox's user base has shrunk to the point where it's barely relevant.
it would come back for sure.
You could have looked up if Safari supports extensions. It does. More limited than other browsers however.
Everyone still remembers Firefox fondly. The wrong move from Google and everyone (who will take a step to manually download a browser) will return to it.
The problem is that Google still pays Mozilla's bills. If their biggest donor suddenly pulls out completely, they'll be in trouble.
I've been using Firefox exclusively for a few years now and it's really great.
It's not about tech, it's about human psychology, monetisation and business planning.
A YouTube user with an AdBlock is highly unlikely to click on any ads making them pretty much useless. So why keep bothering them?
They are likely affluent enough to afford Premium
Sure, but I still won't be paying. There's nothing so important in YouTube that I'd ever even consider paying, I'd drop it like a hot turd if I couldn't block ads.
I don't think it's particularly wise to browse the internet without an ad blocker anymore.
If a site decides to go so far as to actively prevent you from using it without an adblocker, I consider that to be a pretty bad sign.
Fortunately almost no one does that.
To be fair, YT Premium is one of the few subscriptions I think is a no-brainer and good value for money.
Sometimes when I've forgotten to log in and see what it's like without, it's amazing anyone can watch videos on there. Like a lot of people I've generally been OK to watch ads in exchange for free content but it seems over the years instead of ads getting better and/or more relevant to my interests (even broadly), they're getting much worse.
I assume this is the result of companies just accepting ££ for anything rather than having more quality control?
As the old saying goes, good ideas shouldn't require force. If they have a "no-brainer" offering, no need to strong-arm people into using it, right?
I get it that they are not a charity and can monetize or paywall their platforms as seen fit, but there's something just sad about the model where you build a customer-friendly and open platform, then progressively crapify it once you capture a niche and eliminate most alternatives, and then start penalizing users for trying to work around that.
Pretty much all big tech companies figured out this is the recipe for infinite money
Only Microsoft seems to be aware this causes Dutch Disease, min-maxing your monopolistic platform revenue is terrible long-term for you company
Google is pretty far from maximizing their monopolistic platform
What about selling your gmail data? Selling your search queries directly to third parties? Forcing your maps navigations to route near advertisers?
> To be fair, YT Premium is one of the few subscriptions I think is a no-brainer and good value for money.
I cannot think of any subscription that offers literally no upside beside what a free browser extension that you install in 1 click already provides.
Youtube Premium is literally the worst value for money that I can think of, because I can get effortlessly the same for 0 cost.
By this logic, buying e-books from Amazon is the worst value I can think of, because I can get them effortlessly from libgen and other "sources", and a single book can cost as much as the whole year of YouTube premium.
You are comparing something perfectly legal with something absolutely illegal, this makes no sense.
Except ad-blocker is literally just stealing bandwidth. Just because it's legal (under the current law), it doesn't mean it's morally right. Why should Youtube or any hosting service serves a user when they refuses to view the ads? YouTube is not a public service.
It is morally right, not because it is legal, but because I was never asked to make a market transaction for the content. By your reasoning, it would be theft to close your eyes during a TV commercial. I completely reject your line of reasoning.
Ah! Well guess what? Showing me ads that I did not request is stealing MY bandwidth. And much worse than that, it's stealing my time.
Yes, this is why YouTube should just refuse to serve you and other adblocker users. This way it can no longer steal your time, and it's the only fair solution.
Considering Amazon can literally just erase e-books that you supposedly "own", like they literally did with 1984[0], very much yes.
[0] https://gizmodo.com/amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-the-ki...
If you truly believe this (which I don't agree with), at least you're consistent. But I feel "adblock good, piracy bad" is a double standard that many people hold.
Practically, I think adblocker is even slightly worse than piracy. At least when you download a cracked game via a torrent, you don't cost Steam any money.
But it is.
This strikes me as eating the commons.
In Google/YouTube's defense, this mentality is why we can't have nice things. You think it's cheap to host the content YouTube does? Paying for premium to remove ads is a way of saying "Thank you for providing me this service, instead of displaying me irrelevant ads, just take my money"
It's also worth noting that creators get paid more for YT Premium views than ad-based views. YouTube, for all its problems, has far better revenue-sharing than pretty much any other "user generate content" platform.
>You think it's cheap to host the content YouTube does?
These discussions always include bad-faith arguments about offsetting costs.
The purpose of ads on websites like YouTube is not just to offset costs, it is to maximize profits. The distinction is important; it means Google doesn't stop showing you ads once they've paid their bills, so please stop framing it this way. They will show you as many ads as they can before it starts to hurt their bottom line. They are not serving videos to be nice.
Also, don't expect Google to keep the "no ads" policy to YT Premium for long. They can still make people pay for "less ads", as twitter does.
Just remember cable TV on the old times.
This is what we want, though, right? The alternatives would be a paywall, or charge per view. (Or, I guess, pay to "own", like a Kindle ebook, but seems like a mismatch for most of their content.)
you do get youtube music included which is a decent alternative to spotify.
uBlock Origin is literally free
The cost is you have to give another party total access to all of your data on all sites.
Except it's open source and anyone can audit the code any time.
If the developer's extension store account were compromised or sold, they'd push an update to you that stole your data before you could react.
You don't have to auto-update extensions.
What? You download a blocklist. What gets sent back to ublock?
how does it work on iPhone or on the TV?
I would have bought premium years ago if the free version lets you play in background when on mobile. This attitude of going out of your way to cripple EXTREMELY basic feature to get me to pay premium didn't sit well with me.
Asking me to pay for the ability to have background play to me is akin to opening a restaurant and serving unsalted food and asking 2% extra for salt in the food.
I already pay for a few other google services (google one, google cloud etc) and their customer service (that I have needed on the rare occasion) is ..... almost non existent as well.
Will most probably use alternate frontends or a pihole or whatever other alternative there is for as long as I can.
Man, the amount of misunderstanding present in the comments here is astonishing.
1. YT doesn't decide how many ads to show. The creator of the video gets to choose exactly how many ads are shown and when and where they are shown.
If you see too many ads on your videos, get pissed off at the creators you're watching, not YT.
2. Ad revenue is a very large portion of income for most creators. It's definitely not as large as sponsorship deals, but it's nothing to sneeze at. You people who are entitled to your free content aren't sticking it to the man by refusing to watch ads. Instead you're directly hurting the creators you enjoy watching by specifically depriving them of any ad revenue they may otherwise have gained from you. Shut up and sit down and watch the 30 second ad or stop watching YT altogether. The creators don't give a crap either way because you clearly don't give a crap about financially supporting them in the simplest way possible.
3. If anything, I believe YT will stop showing ads if they're too prevalent. There's a feature where creators can play ads at the beginning/ending of their videos. These ads don't play all the time, and I think that's because the YT algorithm is making sure that if you're doing something like playing music it doesn't play an ad at the beginning of every single song even if the video creator tries to make that happen.
Honestly, these comments read as if cable didn't exist just a few years ago (and still does today!) where they literally play 2 minutes of ads for every 5ish minutes of content. Even with DVR, skipping through the ads would take around 30 seconds (and then you have to adjust to make sure you didn't skip too far and everything) which is the length of typical YT ads. Buck up and pay up to support the "amazing" content that you selfishly indulge in and refuse to pay for out of a warped sense of entitlement.
Contrary to popular belief, most content creators are not putting their content out for free. They're putting it out knowing the majority of viewers will at least watch the ads and help them make money.
> 2. Ad revenue is a very large portion of income for most creators.
Maybe we're moving past the societal stage where being a content creator is a real job.
Maybe people aren't meant to make a living from putting videos on the internet.
I use YouTube with an ad blocker and I am not a Premium subscriber anymore and won't pay out of principle after the dislike button removal, which has made using YouTube for tutorials and how-to videos useless for me. Instead, I support creators whose content I enjoy off-YouTube.
I am not worried about Google going forth with this. I see others asking what happens when users won't pay for a subscription and at the same time won't view ads? I believe the answer is pretty clear.
YouTube will either decide to suck up that they won't see ad revenue from a portion of the audience (ad blockers are and will always be a niche thing, there is no reality in which YouTube buckles because too many people block ads, especially since YouTube is predominantly viewed on devices where ad blocking is not as easy as in the desktop browser) or they will close up shop.
The fact is that YouTube currently occupies a spot in the online sphere which will always be occupied by someone: being the top service for hosting videos for free and showing them to audiences for free. There is a line of businesses which would jump on the opportunity of filling YouTube's "woeful" position of being the top dog in online video.
YouTube's collapse would be devastating considering the amount of culture and history stored on there. But new video content will always find a home and reach online. And Google knows this which is why they will IMO never give up on YouTube even if it were operating with loss again. Storage is only getting cheaper and their moat with YouTube is the user-generated content. Gate it too heavily and creators will find a place where they can post content more freely and users will fine a place where they can view content more freely.
I don't expect this to be anything other than YouTube pulling a Netflix with their password sharing crackdown complete with the back-paddling that ensued once they realized how replaceable they really are to a sizeable portion of their viewers loosing which would be more expensive than keeping it.
I'm not angry at Youtube for blocking ads; I'm angry for Youtube existing at all. It shouldn't have to.
AV content is pretty important to humanity. I want my government to tax me and spend the money on a public video repository.
When some garbage for-profit outfit like Alphabet is in charge of the world's video, I expect ads and garbage content.
YouTube is extremely expensive to host and that too when it relies on Google infra which is very well optimised. Please remind me of any non trivial Government software project that didn't cost ridiculous amounts of money compared to similar private products.
Cost is certainly a consideration, but not the only consideration that matters (not to me, at any rate).
The issue of private- vs public-run projects is complicated by culture. There's a vicious cycle / virtuous circle that happens in a given society. In a place where government projects have a bad reputation (of being wasteful and substandard), it makes it difficult for government projects to succeed.
That's a long way of replying to you that you're probably correct about cost-overruns in most nations - but I don't believe it has to be that way. You can probably predict the nations I'd trot out that do a better job.
At any rate, where Youtube is concerned, I'd sooner government be in charge, regardless of cost. I don't see Youtube ever making the public good its primary focus - not if its front page, recommendations, or comments section are any indication.
That's the thing about cost though. It doesn't matter until it grows big enough and then it starts mattering a lot.
Agreed. I just also think living in a knowledgeable society is important. Video could help. Youtube does a terrible job of that. Presumably it's not great economically if a nation is full of dummies.
I'm with you, man. I run an ad blocker and I sure would hate to pay Google another dime. But I have to say objectively, govt ownership ought to be reserved for services that either practically cannot make a profit or morally should not make a profit. Things like police, fire, medical, education, etc.. The entertainment sector though has been making a profit for hundreds of years. Radio was funded entirely by commercialism from the beginning, as was television, and thus far the Internet has followed. So I gotta disagree with you as much as it pains me to admit. There may be a way to get some things funded like purely educational, or the arts, but the vast majority of YouTube is really just pure entertainment and ought to remain profit driven.
Other than driving a mass exodus to Firefox, I don’t see this having any real impact. Unless you own the whole software stack adblock is a game of cat and mouse.
Let’s say worst case scenario google embeds ads into the video itself, and refuses to stream the actual video packets until the length of the ad has elapsed. The repetitive nature of advertising makes if trivial to detect when the served video is an ad and when it’s content. You might be able to make me wait for a video file, but you can’t make me watch an ad. My Firefox extension is gonna replace those advertising frames with a black loading screen and there’s nothing google can do to stop that.
They don't mind the cat and mouse games, as long as they capture some people. Whether this is through showing ads or getting them to subscribe.
I believe this has been successful for Twitch, growing revenue despite decrease in concurrent viewers. So the real impact seems obvious to me, even if I would personally avoid it.
You are not their target TBH, it is just a trade-off.
Anyone on HN is too tech-savy already. YouTube "just" wants to capture the 99,9% that won't compile a homebrew YT app.
As long as the grandchild can't simply click "install UBlock Origin", they're going to be fine, revenue-wise.
https://joinpeertube.org/
I wish Peertube was more usable. The UX is generally subpar (although impressive for an ActivityPub-based system). There's also the problem that hosting servers to host video is _so damn expensive_. There is literally only one Peertube instance I ever watch videos on (https://tilvids.com/) and I'm honestly considering stopping using it altogether. I'm not sure what I want out of Framasoft really, but I don't think Peertube or any similar solution becomes viable soon without socializing costs for video hosting, encoding, etc.
Peertube of course has the peer system, but I don't think my client has ever uploaded more than 100kb from any peers, it's all from the server. There's also no way that I know of to "donate" some network/storage BitTorrent style to servers I wish to support, which again means the costs are all centralized and extremely high.
> I don't think my client has ever uploaded more than 100kb from a video I was watching, nor has it downloaded from anyone but the server.
Where is that info available?
On top of the video player hover over the "x peers" on the bottom, it will tell you how much data you downloaded, uploaded, and how much of the download came from peers or the server.
I ran my own peertube server for a while.
You can configure your server to download and mirror videos from other instances, but (iirc) only if the remote instance allows it, and if it allows your instance to "follow" it.
The fact that you haven to follow other servers as a server is insane. It also really fucks up federation, because some instances do not allow follows at all. Tilvids does not, which was a major factor in me shutting down my instance.
That said, the mirroring system is really nice. You have all sorts of dials to cache only the x most popular videos for y days and up to z GB. You can have it mirror videos from user subscriptions in a similar way, and right next to the 'download video' button is one that says 'mirror' that does what you think.
P2P as a client is a whole different matter, and I also have never, ever seen my client uploading. I think this is purely a function of how few users are actually on peertube. The chances of you watching the same video as another person on the planet is incredibly small.
I really, really want to like peertube, but it really is completely unusable. Discovery is abysmal because there's no global search. You can't rely on federation to find content because federation is opt-in and has a crazy nonsense mechanism.
Peertube is not fit to run a single-user instance like mastodon unless you only want to publish. It simply doesn't work at all if you only wish to consume video. The only real way to use the service at all is to sign up on the biggest instance you can find and hope they have interesting videos.
I have a server with tons of free disk and a big fat fiber line, and the idea of mirroring peertube videos of small creators sounds like a perfect use for my spare resources. I would love to mirror tilvids to help reduce their server load, but I simply can't because they choose to disallow it.
The only alternative is LBRY/Odyssey, which is vastly more popular, but has some serious issues with violent/extreme/illegal content and is fully wrapped up in blockchain bullshit.
Or just download with yt-dlp (https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp).
Why even download?
You can use third party media players like MPC-BE or MPC-HC that leverage yt-dlp to stream the video into a media player without any ads of course.
Yes, sometimes it makes sense to download if you want to keep the video, but to just watch just stream it via yt-dlp to a media player.
How about non windows users? Like does VLC has similar integration with yt-dlp?
For more info on mpv: <https://mpv.io/>
mpv is cross-platform.
> Why even download?
A major part apart from building a queue by getting behind is the ability of the file manager to sort, to classify, to filter, to move into folders, to search, etc. Far better than the youtube web interface, which only has the options of displaying your subscriptions as a grid or as a list. So I now have a local queue of videos which I can use, in which weird expeditions into obscure genres are into their own folders, must-match-now videos are tagged, etc, and I can pick and choose according to my own tastes of the moment.
That is one of my pet peeves in UI design in the last decade and it is not only web applications – shoebox apps are often as limited. If you want to do anything to your data or just have different sort orders or views, you only have what the app developer allows and often that is nothing.
Thanks to the web and shoebox apps I appreciate file managers like Finder even more now. It’s amazing what UI controls like NSTableView/NSOutlineView gives the user in functionality. Modern collection views often look better and I appreciate that, but I do miss the functionality which, while possible, often simply is not implemented.
>Why even download?
Because it will likely get harder and harder to download from Youtube, and the option may actually disappear forever eventually.
Downloading is an option, though there are of course numerous others:
- You can stream directly. I do this via a bash function for cases where mpv itself doesn't play a video (for reasons I've been unable to / not had the spoons to track down):
- You can use ytdlp as a front-end to other tools, and in fact if you peek under the bonnet you'll find that many YouTube / video streaming tools are in fact using yt-dlp as their access mechanism.
- There are times when downloading a video is the only way to be assured that you'll have access to content in the future, or when offline. Note that when YouTube removes content it also removes all metadata associated with that content, including title, description, and the account which had posted it.
My mpv calls yt-dlp directly, and it can even seek.
Mine likewise, but it still encounters errors frequently, particularly with YouTube, which my hack addresses. Even after updating to the most recently-available versions.
This is on Android / F-Droid / pip. I've hacked those specifically to keep yt-dlp and mpv as updated as possible.
Slightly off-topic, is there an easy way to automatically stream files you've downloaded to your local machine to play on an iPhone later?
https://jellyfin.org/
I use Brave on iOS, and it has the ability to download videos for offline watching. It’s one of my favorite features.
You're looking for a media server. Plex, Jellyfin and Emby are the 3 popular choices, out of which Jellyfin is the only completely free open source software
You can use alternative front ends like piped, invidious or apps like libretube.
This is the way.
I use invidious with Yattee on iOS/macOS/tvOS.
Total bliss.
Amazing.
Won't Google just block this next as soon as they finish blocking ad blockers?
I don’t block ads - I block YouTube trying to monetise things that are built into the internet and my phone - eg. Video that plays in the background when I close the website
It is just offensive that they want me to pay for something that is my phones feature not theirs.
Sadly I expect this to get blocked just the same
> I block YouTube trying to monetise things that are built into the internet and my phone - eg. Video that plays in the background
Sounds like the situation is unchanged for you then?
Well, I expect they will block this too…
Makes me really happy that I recently subscribed to Nebula. I had YouTube Premium for a while but the experience kept getting worse. They removed email notifications, added more and more ads for "premium features" that I wasn't interested in and kept making offline downloads a pain (YouTube DL is usually a better experience). On top of that the recommendations are awful and search results have random unrelated ads for "recommended videos" inline with the thing I was actually searching for. At some point I felt mistreated enough and stopped my subscription.
Nebula is great. It feels like they are actually just trying to allow me to watch videos, no nonsense. I have found a few bugs and the support team is nice and responsive. I can't imagine what else I would want.
Do you use their app?
I used Nebula for a while a year or two ago, but their Android app was almost unusably bad, so I cancelled my subscription. I'm curious if it's any better now.
I do use their app. About 50/50 Firefox and the Android app.
There is a pretty annoying bug regarding Chromecast (opening a link when already connected to a device doesn't work properly) that I reported but apparently they are working on it. But other than that I haven't had any issues.
Youtube Premium keeps raising their prices. I'd be happy to pay less for something that doesn't include Music streaming.
I think this is the first time they've raised prices since Red was announced?
I believe they have changed the price 3 times in my country.
It likely depends on the currency.
There's a "lite" option for €7/month (instead of €12) which only removes ads, but doesn't include music and all the other stuff. Prices may differ per region; this is what it shows for me.
Not available in the USA, unfortunately.
Huh, odd. Not sure why you'd want to region-limit that(?)
It's only being experimented in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, Norway, the Netherlands, and Sweden.
I wish there was an ad-light version. No ads in the middle of the video. Just occasional pre-roll ads. I'd happily pay $5 per month for it.
I hope this leads to a viable competitor to Youtube. Youtube being the de-facto video host for medium length content has pretty noticeable effects on how content is created to tailor to Youtube's algorithms and users.
I would love to see a BitTorrent-style solution to video hosting. If your video is popular, there's more seeders, but also you can just seed it yourself. Then you can have an ecosystem where there's different indexers with different recommendation algorithms but the content is the same.
Odysee is the one I see referenced the most
That’s what PeerTube does. It’s based on WebTorrent.
Can a creator of monetize videos on peertube?
I use ad blocker a lot. After seeing this title, for a sec I felt frustrated about YouTube but then I realized it is better for me and my family to subscribe YouTube premium… and I just did it.
Long story: We are Chinese family living in US. We listen to both Chinese and English songs. We have both Apple Music and Spotify memberships, but due to copyright, many Chinese songs are not available (sometime this is true for other languages or even English songs, that’s why we have both subscriptions). Since a few years ago, I just found that YouTube has all the songs we love, some are high quality live stage recordings that are even better to listen (kinda surprising since YouTube is blocked in China mainland). So nowadays my family are listening music on YouTube more frequently: we have our own playlists, use YouTube on iPhone Safari with AdGuard so no noisy ads. The problem is we have to keep safari open and can’t use other apps when listening to music. Also jumping in the playlist is painful especially when driving.
Now this HN title just reminds me of YouTube premium that has no ads, supports background playing, and better playlist control. Then I really don’t see a reason to keep Apple Music and Spotify subscriptions which together cost more but still lack of songs we love.
Disclaimer: I work for Google and this represents my personal opinion.
I pay for the premium. I have a 2nd gen Chromecast. For some time there is a modified interface and it is akin to Youtube TV. So you see thumbnails for the proposed videos there. They also advertised having a remote control for the interface from the Youtube app on the phone. They display often a huge banner to sign in for the best experience. But when you try it gives an unhelpful message: "Can't sign in. You can still watch YouTube as ... bla bla". It is intentional: https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1537338169108140033
If you select a video from this interface you will be served with ads. Sometimes with an additional banner to sign in and enjoy Premium.
I would gladly ignore this interface, but my daughter likes to select things out of it. I would just prefer to have it like it was before (just a static image until you play something) instead of this thing screaming at me.
That sometimes makes me want to cancel the Premium.
I would happily pay for youtube premium if:
- They removed the useless "shorts"
- They removed the "mix" things that keep coming back like a bad smell
- They let me remove youtube music
- Their suggestions were less terrible. Like seriously they run the biggest data centers in the world, have some of the best ML researchers and know what I actually watch. How do they manage to be so consistently bad at this?
- Their search was less terrible. They figured out search of the whole internet 20 years ago, how is search in YT worse than searching YT from duckduckgo?
- if they weren't a platform
- if they weren't owned by Google
I have been burned, yet again, by YouTube just deciding that my comments were spam and removing at least the last half dozen of them. At least they haven't shadowbanned them this time.
And of course I got no warnings whatsoever about this, and trying to contact Google about this issue is likely to be a waste of time.
This is an enormous abuse of moderation (and a violation of netiquette) that I have only ever seen on platforms.
I don’t understand. You would pay for YouTube premium if youtube had less features?
I don’t use shorts and for a long time I didn’t use YouTube music either (despite paying for premium). I now use it because it’s rather good.
And YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is crazy good, but you have to tune it. It’s a tool. You tune it by not watching shitty videos you don’t like; if you do, remove them from your history afterwards and hit thumbs down on them. Subscribe to channels you like and thumbs up videos you really like. All these things are strong signals and the recommendation algorithm will vastly improve if you do this.
I mean it when I say it’s the absolute most useful tool there is in terms of discovery on the web.
But yes their search sucks more ass than a donkey vacuum.
Yes it would be better if it didn't have those features in the same way that I would pay more for a Burrito if someone had not taken a shit in it.
I might be a weird edge case. I do all the things you say but the recommendations totally suck for me. I only watch videos I like. I watch a lot of videos. If I ever watch something I didn't like I remove it and thumbs down and yet all the recommendations are total garbage.
Edit to add: i get that shorts, mix and music are things some people like. I really don’t and I hate that mix I can’t remove at all and shorts I can remove for 30 days and then it comes back. It feels like google is doing this sort of dark pattern bs more and more.
That said: I have been convinced by people pointing out how much more valuable premium views are to people who make the stuff I watch so have subscribed. Makes me puke just a little bit to say that.
> that I would pay more for a Burrito if someone had not taken a shit in it.
It sounds more like you’re unhappy to be getting 2 burritos and you’d rather get only 1 for the exact same price.
Just don’t watch the shorts. All they are is a line on the homepage. I ignore it.
They take up real estate that I need for more suggestions because only about 1 in 50 suggestion is good.
No, it sounds more like you are being served your burrito with a cocktail, even though you are trying to quit cold turkey.
On another note, I find it highly offending that somebody tries to shove something down my throat, even though I explicitly refused it. No, I do not want shorts on the home screen, or anywhere else. Let me own my screen real estate, after all, this is supposed to be a premium service?
What is up with the entitlement?
I mean I don’t like shorts either and I don’t like how YouTube is “shoving” them as you say, but how are you under the impression that just because you pay fifteen bucks a month you get full control over how the homepage looks? Your logic applies to every single pixel on their website.
Shorts are a feature of YouTube. You don’t have to use it or look at it, and it only shows up on the homepage or when you’re looking at other shorts. It’s really not unreasonable.
If you want to pay and not get shorts but still get good content just subscribe to nebula, it’s also fantastic value, just as YouTube is.
I'd personally pay for a lot of services if they allow you to toggle certain features off.
uBlock's great but it doesn't work in Safari.
You can hide all shorts with uBlock Origin
One argument I heard at some point is that google is better of if people who don't click ads use ad-block.
If you care enough that you install ad-blockers you will not click on any ads anyway. If they block ad-block then their click-per-view metrics will go down which looks bad to advertisers and makes ad spots sell for less
Of course that is a very simple view of a very complex problem, but there is definitely some merit to it. For example ad-block these days has been normalised enough that too many people do it, even people that would click some ads. Also, specifically for youtube, by allowing ad-block you reduce the value of youtube premium (which is not true for google search for example, there is no google search premium)
Definitely Google is better off serving exactly the ads a user will click, including no ads for the user who will never ever click any ad, even one from their favorite sneaker brand. But I think a lot fewer people are actually in the never ever camp than they think. And even though I know I click ads on occasion, I still run an ad blocker.
Are we including accidental clicks in the "never click ads" demographic?
If I had to choose only one online subscription that I pay for that would be YouTube Premium.
It really surprises me that they DON'T do this for everyone yet. Is it a technical thing? Is it hard to detect blockers for them? Are they afraid of losing views? Genuinely curious what's holding them back at this point.
This is pure speculation.
1. Youtube is profitable, so there is no pressure to do it immediately.
2. It may hurt video creators more than it helps. Many youtubers are sponsored, so they would prefer a view with adblock over no viewer. This keeps them on the platform.
3. Similarly, it keeps viewers on the platform, and maybe more importantly, away from other platforms.
Given that they have the largest analytics platform, they should be able to fairly easily see that sites that employ adblocker blockers suffer very high bounce rates for visits coming from search.
Personally, I would absolutely stop going to youtube if they tried to block me from visiting while my adblocker is active.
Exactly, they should want those people to bounce and not come back.
What if a competitor decides to serve these customers?
What if that is enough customers for that competitor to build a product good enough to also attract the people Google wants to keep?
> these customers?
They are not customers.
Funny story, my wife wanted to watch a show on Amazon Freevee, and for the first time in years we were treated to what people watching cable TV without a DVR have to go through.
Odds are, we won't watch anything else there.
I don't mind supporting content creators and distributors, but the volume and repetitive nature of watching the same ads over and over again exceeds the value I get from the content.
As for YouTube, I already have enough subscriptions, so I might just end up not using it anymore. The volume of new content for the niches I look for tends to be very low.
A/B testing. They're doing this for everything, a few months ago they blocked videos to 3rd party apps (Newpipe, Revanced, ...) only for certain accounts in certain countries
Maybe manifest v2 will be removed for real soon.
I actually subscribe to YT Premium. More than happy to for an ad-free experience.
But that's tied to my personal account. Sometimes I want to watch a video on my work laptop, or just in incognito mode. I would find it incredibly irritating if that were blocked because I use an adblocker. In this case I've paid for no ads, I just don't want this particular video linked to my personal account.
This has the potential to help me quit Youtube altogether. The amount of time I waste on there is embarrassing. But I will never disable my ad blocker, and I won't pay money to mindlessly waste time scrolling through videos.
This will save them whatever it costs to serve me videos, and I will spend my life more productively. Win - Win.
It doesn't look very complex, nothing a simple ublock/brave block element can't remove, at least not yet.
Yet. Twitch has some pretty hardcore ad system that even uBlock can't block straight up and you have to use a combination of tools/scripts
https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions
https://old.reddit.com/r/Adblock/comments/10fgy9y/twitch_adb...
TIL Twitch has ads.
Because they are embedded in the stream itself something I am not sure would be viable for youtube to do at their scale. For twitch, you basically have to use a proxy hosted in another country where they dont show ads to retrieve the stream links.
They're not embedded in the UK at least, you can confirm this by watching something via the Twitch plugin for Kodi which is sent video of a countdown timer instead.
They aren't. If you watch a stream for example with streamlink/VLC then ads looks like this when they are played https://files.catbox.moe/n7sb34.png
I only have uBlock Origin and never see ads on Twitch.
Downvoting does not change this fact (and if I knew exactly why my experience is different, I would provide details).
Same with uMatrix. However I do get YouTube ads... Twitch ads sound like they would be horribly frustrating because of the real time nature of the experience !
Where are you located?
It's rare to see Twitch ads because they don't have very much ad inventory. But if you happen to be a rare match for one of the few ads they have, you'll see that same ad over and over and over again.
I work in ad-tech. The tech to make ads unblockable has existed for years now (server side ad insertion makes ads indistinguishable from content because they're delivered through the same gateway in the same video stream thus bypassing DNS/network and DOM based ad blocking).
However, it's still rarely used because sufficiently capable users with advanced adblockers do not make up enough lost revenue over the increased infrastructure cost.
It's been fascinating watching Google lag in this area given the amount of engineering resources, market share, and platform control they have. We in the industry theorized that they'd use their dominant market position with Chrome and Android to protect their ad business, which is why they didn't invest much in unblockable or required ads. But it appears it's not for lack of want, it seems like it's just poor execution and unexpected diminishing market share.
> We in the industry theorized that they'd use their dominant market position with Chrome and Android to protect their ad business, which is why they didn't invest much in unblockable or required ads.
they're waiting for manifest v3
This might actually be great for saving people from wasting their time on youtube (like me!).
I think YouTube Premium LITE is definitely worth the 7 € I pay for it, and I wish YouTube would actually tell users about it.
If I had known there was a LITE option I would have subbed probably years ago - but it seems like they do their damndest best to try not to tell you about it.
Twitch does the same. They have some kind of site-wite subscription ("twitch turbo"). Although I think it is a tad expensive for what it is. And they do their damndest best for you not to know about it.
I just Googled it... looks like it was released in 2021 for select countries. Still not available in UK. £7 seems like a reasonable amount and I would 100% pay that. £12 is just too much.
Ads are a cancer on modern society. People act like they're OK, but I feel like these ads are constantly using up brain space that could be used for something else. Constantly being surrounded with messages telling you what you need, what you want, who or what you should be, how inferior your life is if you don't have X product. Ugh.
They will pry my ad-block from my cold, dead hands. I will sooner stop using YT altogether than give in on this.
While I totally get video hosting is expensive, when it's YouTube (and Google in general) and their extremely hostile, intrusive, arrogant behavior over UX, I can't stop thinking that they fail and people keep leeching them.
The thing with the paid subscription is that the bastards still track you. Paying for the service does not exclude you from surveillance, it supposedly makes it less obtrusive. Ad-blocker is insufficient for anything close to anonymity, and so is everything else. But it does make the tracking harder and it does move you ever so slightly to the tail of every distribution that matters for fingerprinting.
One step in avoiding being tracked is to not log in and use RSS to follow your fav channels.
I've been enjoying an ad-free experience on my iPad, iPhone, and Mac by my one time purchase of "vinegar".
https://andadinosaur.com/launch-vinegar
If YT would now block me completely, I would simply have one less reason to use them at all. PeerTube is my go-to first stop anyways.
YouTube ads are cancerous. The blowback will be massive for such a thing. Though, I am not sure if Google will listen as there are some real major costs to streaming at the scale YouTube does.
I hope my sheer stubbornness will keep me from ever subscribing to Youtube premium.
- Google used to have Google Music, which I loved and paid for willingly as it was a good service, the recommendation algorithm was _not bad_, the UI was _okay_, and you could upload your own music and have it integrate with their system.
- Google used to by default allow you to play Youtube in the background and let you use the picture in picture mode for free - they removed that feature and put it behind a paywall.
- You can't volume control ads. I have Youtube playing in the background on my bedside table at night and having consistent volume is key. I don't want blaring audio telling me to buy X product or use Y service, waking me up when I'm trying to sleep. Yet another way for them to convince you to get Youtube premium.
- I hate all forms of advertisements. Don't shove advertisements in my face. If I want a product, I'll look for it and do my own research. I don't want algorithms and AI deciding what I want to purchase. When I've had advertising slip through, it's usually for things that I've already bought recently (mattress, clothing, etc.)
I will continue to willingly eat away at Google's profits for as long as they run YouTube.
I've been looking into some kind of open source solution that automatically grabs my Youtube history playlist and downloads and automatically catalogs these videos on a network share somewhere locally. (If someone can recommend a solution, please feel free!)
Too many times I've had videos that I've added to a playlist be removed for some inane reason (copyright violation, DMCA requests, etc. etc.)
Well said friend, I'm on the same page with almost all of these things!
I have a long term plan to setup a suite of the existing self-hosted front-ends to various services just for me and my immediate family to personally use.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35883457
I only block the in video ads because they are so intrusive. I don't mind any of the other ads on the platform and am not against advertising in general. They have also gotten money from me via their 30% cut of super chat fees so I probably do earn Youtube more money than the average user.
I mean if YouTube wants to block ad blockers, that's unfortunate, but I also understand the motivation. But here's the rub. Youtube premium is still not available globally. I had a weird workaround that I used a long time ago through google play but when my current credit card expires, I won't be able to use that method again and all the benefits of my membership will go away. That really sucks because I actually enjoy the ads free experience and the fact that I can pay for it.
I don't understand how a giant company like Google hasn't figured out global availability of a service like this. Especially given that videos can be geo locked if needed.
> don't understand how a giant company like Google hasn't figured out global availability of a service like this
Running a user-generated content business has become exponentially more complicated in the last decade. Compliance and moderation is hard. It's also difficult to scale across jurisdictions.
But the content is present globally. We are talking about a subscription to block ads. If it’s to do with some YouTube original content, they can not distribute it here for all I care. I’ve seen that content and it’s awful.
If it’s about tax collection, then that’s again weird because google will take money for any other service. I genuinely don’t understand it and I can’t find a single good explanation out there for it either.
Sorry if that comes across as aggressive. I promise that it’s entirely just exasperation at this point :(
Google is just the middle man here, creators can turn off ads on videos if they want to but a lot of them need revenue or at least want revenue so the question becomes what's the best way to reward creators for their work? There are multiple models that I can think of but there will be much less people on yt if it would cost even a few cents. Once you're used to free stuff, even with bloated content as now it takes a while to get used to paying. The current model works because 3rd parties pay and not the actual consumer.
I'm curious how does yt share profit with creators for views from paying subscribers.
My beef with Youtube is that it keeps showing me the same suggestions over and over. I do use an ad blocker, originally installed for security reasons.
I have found a lot of good content on YT, but lately, the suggestions are just terrible and the "hunt" is taking longer and getting frustrating - sort of like Netflix, which I cancelled. I'm guessing they keep suggesting videos that make the most money for Google, even if I don't want to watch it. If the content suggestions on YT were better, I might consider subscribing to it, but with the way it is now, ads will definitely push me to leave.
the people who have a blockers enabled are also the lest likely to click an ad or buy anything advertised . advertisers should want these people to not be shown ads.
The people who have ad blockers installed are an extremely self-selective demographic who have taken a physical action. This type of demographic is extraordinarily valuable to sell advertising to.
Which is why allowing self serve adverts would benefit everyone. Uccasionally I want to see related items for sale, but there is no option if the video uploader hasnt already put monitized affiliate links. Seems like its leaving money, and viewer satisfaction, on the table.
Bingo. I would prefer a related items list I can click on. I might not use it often, but have nevwr in my life voluntarily clicked a banner ad or link thru a video ad.
I did, by accident
Does YT detect that the ad wasn't played and therefore doesn't pay out for that view to the creator?
From an incentives perspective, putting the onus on the creators to convince their viewers to enable ads might be more effective, but on the other hand that feels kind of shitty to do to creators, so IDK if it's ultimately a good idea...
Yes. Watching with an ad blocker will not yield any revenue for the creator, unless you are logged in an account with YouTube Premium.
When I first started using Youtube in late 2006, it didn't have ads, and I didn't have an ad-blocker because I didn't know they existed. Since then, I've more or less used Youtube the same way as I did. I use an ad-blocker now as part of my normal web browsing, and it, thankfully, happens to work on Youtube, giving me that same experience. If I eventually lose the ability to use ad-blockers on Youtube, I'll probably just wind up using it a lot less. I'm not sure I want to add yet another monthly payment.
YouTube could pay me to watch ads, they are using the processing power of my computer and the electricity I pay to show them. It's not like TV where nothing actually changes and I can't disable them.
This move will hurt badly those content creators who appeal to a more knowledgeable user base, but I will not watch YouTube without an AD blocker.
I am probably in the vast minority, I understand it, both my father and my nephews don't know that there was a version of the internet without ads and that you could block them.
I guess YouTube made their calculations.
I do my best to keep the ads on when I'm using services that are ads-sustained, but... Come on YouTube, you're throwing several minutes long ads at me, and if I don't click "skip" because I'm washing the dishes, then instead of compensating me for watching it by going to the video (as you do when I hit "skip"), you throw another ad at me because you know that I'm likely unable to skip that as well.
Also I'm more and more convinced that YouTube listens on my microphone for running water.
Question for anyone who bought YouTube Premium and tried to cancel later: how did it go?
Years ago I bought a Chromecast for a family member but ended up sending it back because it was subpar. The return process was so frustrating (not to mention the difficulty in deleting the mandatory Google Wallet account) that I vowed to never trust Google with any money again. I feel I’d rather stop watching YouTube entirely.
I’m interested in experiences, good and bad, of cancelling as YouTube Premium.
I canceled mine recently when I switched from Youtube Music to Apple Music when Classical released. It was painless.
LPT: Use a Syrian VPN and Google won't advertise to you in any of their products (due to sanctions). Only use this for read-only content (YouTube, Search et al).
I hope you realise Syrian VPNs do not exist
He does have an idea. Are there any VPNs that let you acquire an Iranian IP? Iran is not even a geotargeting option in Google ads because of all the sanctions. I've always wondered what Google search results looked like from inside the country? Pure and ad free?
YouTube's quality deteriorated. The amount of ads is obnoxious. Lack of dislike button to check, if a video of worth it probably inflated the view rate. They try to squeeze as much money as possible (hey Preference Max - we know it's only to allocate some of the money in the platform), until TikTok takes over.
I don't need YT, the content they host is not worth paying and I wouldn't have a problem to live without it.
I think they’ve been testing this for a while. Noticed a couple of ads slipping through uBlock on Mac Safari a few months back. Haven’t seen it happen recently, though.
Personally I don’t mind a few ads, but the volume of them was just getting completely out of control for a while there on YouTube. It’s what prompted me to finally install an ad blocker!!
Why not yt premium? The added benefit of paying is that you won't see ads on your phone or TV.
If it helps, I have a tool for downloading, written in Go:
http://github.com/4cq2/mech
Why not just use the very widely used yt-dlp?
My tool can compile to a single EXE for Windows, macOS or Linux. Plus mine works with Widewine.
If YouTube blocks me from watching videos because I use an ad blocker then I'll stop watching videos on YouTube. I don't care if this doesn't hurt YouTube... it will help me stop spending so much time on YouTube.
> it will help me stop spending so much time
Oh gosh, really? Don't you think you'll come back after a few weeks?
I think the bigger impact is that it'll impede new user adoption. I use an adblocker (but pay for YouTube,) and I never use sites that block me for using an adblocker.
You state you never use sites that block adblockers, right after disagreeing (questioning? Exclaiming??) with the parent for for expressing the exact same point?
100% this, I'm not watching ads. I haven't really seen any advertising on my electronic devices in a decade (edit: actually closer to two decades) and that's the way it will continue to be. My time is valuable, my mental space is valuable, my computer is mine. You will not make it do things I don't want it to do. Advertising is a plague on society.
(I speak from experience, I worked for 3 years at an ad agency.)
…you can purchase ad free YouTube.
Which I will absolutely never be doing.
Why should they care about your indignation then? You're literally just costing them money in resources.
Honest question - why not? I am paying for Youtube Premium, it's not different to me than paying for Netflix or Spotify. I'm using a service which I like so I don't mind supporting it. If it helps me get rid of ads, so much the better.
it's certainly different than Netflix given that they actually make content. On Youtube you're just paying a tax to the fiefdom. Given that a lot of creators have patreon which takes a miniscule cut I'd rather pay creators as directly as possible.
Paying a company with a market dominating position 150 bucks per year to not hold me hostage with blocked UI functions is kind of ridiculous.
While I wouldn't pay for YT either, they do have serious infrastructure costs so it's not quite as you describe.
While I agree with your comment there is something seriously wrong with the fact that Google can use its infinite funds so that a serious competitor for YT never has any chances of appearing. If YT were a standalone company and would compete on fair terms in others, we might see some reasonable business models appear.
We know how much Netflix spends on content. In 2022, it was 52% of their revenue ($16.7B content budget, $32B revenue). We also know how much YouTube pays for the content, since their ad revenue split has been public for like a decade. It's 55% to the creators for the content, 45% to YouTube for the technical and social infrastructure.
Huh. Looks like YouTube pays more for their content than Netflix does! Given the only stated basis for your opinion turned out to be incorrect, are you changing your mind?
No, that napkin math doesn't check out unless you think Youtube is a non-profit. They pocket half of what creators make, and that has no relationship to their infrastructure cost, it's a function of their market power. They could change that revenue split tomorrow to 70/30 while they cut infrastructure costs for all you or I know.
You somehow turned my argument on its head. I don't care how much Netflix or YT pay for content, I only care that I pay directly for content, and because Netflix is a media company, not a platform, I don't need to guess how much they're squeezing creators or consumers. I transparently pay for a movie catalog, and that is the service provided.
Any money i could give to google is a drop in their ocean of ad revenue, that's why. Google is being disingenuous af, nothing new. Also Youtube has become so important it should be much more regulated.
Google would be one of the last companies I would shove money into, voluntarily.
All the ads that YT shows are paid by us when we buy products of companies that pay Google to show ads. This is how Google is getting all their billions, from you (wether or not you personally watch ads, as long companies believe it's worth giving money for showing ads).
It's such a parasitic business model that I am glad I can be a parasite to Google
The money flow looks like this:
Ad -> YT -> Content Creators
You prevent YT and Content Creators from making money when you block an ad.
Blocking ads of these products, means when you purchase a product (shampoo, razors, etc) more of your money goes into these companies that created these products.
And, in your case, who pays the content creator for the content you enjoy? and who pays for the engineering and infrastructure that delivered the content?
And, since you never saw the ad, you likely didn't buy any product either.
> And, since you never saw the ad, you likely didn't buy any product either.
That's the big con behind ads, especially online ads. If there was research showing that ads don't make any difference at all for the vast majority of purchases ...
https://marketinginsidergroup.com/marketing-strategy/digital...
Secondly, ads are a more insidious version of the old visa scam. They're a tax on everyone, whether they viewed the ad or not. I avoid ads, and where I can't I actively avoid the product. It's not even about being cheap, I am actively disgusted at ads these days, and that transfers to the product being advertised. I doubt I'm the only one.
Thirdly, already Youtube ads don't allow "normal" content creators to survive. Not enough money. So youtube is a con. Content creators won't keep creating ... and it doesn't matter what you do. Youtube is a pyramid scheme, in that it's making the promise of jobs, even richess if you just "produce content", and it's dependent on a constant flow of fresh suckers taking that bet. Nearly all of them will lose big.
Just about every one of "my favorite creators" have a video complaining about it (those videos are really becoming boring), yet the vast majority of their views are monetized, so even "fixing" ad blocking 100% won't help them.
sounds like you're avoiding paying creators and just making up 'rationales' for continuing to not support them. if you're unwilling to support creators and unwilling to participate in creator economy and creator platforms by watching ads - then don't participate in all parts of that creator ecosystem - don't watch their content. creators participate in it by putting their content out there. but you're selectively picking what's most beneficial to you, and watch the content while refusing to compensate creators for it in those ways, intended by the platforms, and by creators themselves, who intentionally enable monetization of their content. good for you, but the 'virtuousness' of 'not participating in platform racket' isn't checking out.
Paying or not paying into an unsustainable system is not moral, or immoral, it is only stupid. Youtube, just like Uber, Amazon and Alibaba are temporary things that cannot survive. They won't survive the influx of new "creators", and the quality is already racing to the bottom, as is the money paid out to Youtubers. I enjoy them, aware that certain events are RACING towards us.
Currently on this same site:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35901889
So here's my attitude: if I'm falling to my death out of a plane, the end result completely out of my control, I hope I'll spend the time fantasizing about elaborate ways to save myself and generally enjoy the way down. Same with Youtube and other gig economy "let's underpay everyone!" attitude ... I'm not convincing myself nothing's going wrong. I'm aware fantasy doesn't change a thing. I'm aware I don't change a thing and the only thing that can keep this system going is investors hoping for profit (or a greater fool). And so I enjoy the fall.
"And wow! Hey! What’s this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like … ow … ound … round … ground! That’s it! That’s a good name – ground!
I wonder if it will be friends with me?"
I pay the content creator, if I don't want him to go away: liberapay or Patreon
Otherwise I am already paying a fee for public broadcasters of my country.
I probably bought a product, because almost every company does ads. This means I pay for YouTube, I pay for GMail, I pay for Android, I pay for GDocs, etc. although I don't even want to use it.
I'd rather had Android died in favor of Windows Phone
> Honest question - why not?
YT Premium only makes the problem worse by requiring you to log in using an account that is tied to your real world identity and was used for payment processing. You just end up giving more data points to Google to track you, cross-reference with other sources and shove more ads in other platforms, still get native ads, and Google can just add their own ads later (as it is happening step by step with streaming companies).
One thing for me is that the youtube app stops the audio when the phone locks. I want to listen to a video while I'm driving, I'll even put up with the ads, but I actually can't do it unless I use an alternative front-end app - which is how I've solved the problem.
Restricting background-play is an active choice on Youtube's part to prevent what I would consider a basic function and hold it hostage behind their paywall.
That behaviour fucks me off such that I refuse to sponsor it.
Highly recommend newpipe, an alternate youtube client that doesn't do this bullshit. (ofc not available on iOS because apple hates you having choices)
Vanced still works for me, but I've got newpipe, libretube, skytube as alternatives ;)
Because it’s giving money to Google? Plus half the problem is the tracking, they’re not going to stop tracking me if I pay them, and then I have to use it logged in which just makes the tracking easier.
That's kind for the video makers you're actively not supporting.
If you want to help video makers get Youtube to be transparent about its payout structure.
I'm not going to be extorted lol. If you're showing me something I have a right to ignore the parts I don't care about, and I have a right to have a computer do the ignoring for me so I don't waste my time/mental effort.
You're not being extorted, you have no right to access to YouTube's content unconditionally.
Youtube has a monopoly on online video content. It is extortion
Before they had the total monopoly, they had very few ads. Now they have the monopoly, so they are extorting us because of it
Oh man, let me help you find other content platforms! What are you interested in?!
I use these non cable/network platforms:
* https://dropout.tv <- comedy produced shows, hilarious
* https://curiositystream.com/ <- full to the brim with documentaries and educational content
* https://www.pbs.org/explore/ <- it's PBS, but online!
* https://www.britbox.com/us/ <- British TV shows! So many good ones...
And then there are the obvious platforms that aren't YT:
* HBO Max
* Peacock
* Netflix
* Paramount+
* Hulu
* Amazon Prime Video
* Apple TV+
So no, I don't really agree that YouTube has a monopoly. Too many alternatives that kick ass!
Extremely obvious case of apples not being oranges, in the sense of user-generated content not being the same as studio/production company generated content.
Just a passerby, but content isn't fungible; no one is replacing Technology Connections with House of the Dragon or vice versa. The diversity of YouTube's content, the back catalog, its default status, network effects, integration with devices and services, and so much more make it hard to replace.
And we shouldn't forget, rando users can upload whatever for sharing, which none of your alternatives do. Kind of the core idea there.
I love Technology Connections FWIW, completely changed how I use my dishwasher!
And I would disagree re: content isn't fungible. Nothing on YouTube is both necessary to specifically consume and entirely unavailable elsewhere. It's entertainment, and whatever "category" of entertainment you prefer, you can find content not on YouTube for that thing.
"Random users uploading content" has not been the primary use case of YouTube for many years now. It's mostly run by content creators now, with entire companies dedicated to creating content, just the same as the platforms I've listed.
> So no, I don't really agree that YouTube has a monopoly. Too many alternatives that kick ass!
None of those are YouTube alternatives. They are not even remotely similar. You haven't got a clue what YouTube is about.
Here's a list of YouTube alternatives:
* Rumble
* Odysee
* Vimeo
* Twitch
* BitChute
But the alternatives are niche platforms with nowhere near the level of content that YouTube provides.
except ad free youtube still has ads (in the form of sponsored content). and your data on youtube is still mined to serve you more ads elsewhere.
this isnt about ads. it's just another tactic for forcing users to log in.
I must confess I still don't understand why ads are not a CFAA violation. I mean, what are the website operators going to argue? That you voluntarily configured your user agent to display them? That argument is far too dangerous to the advertisers.
You can always watch on one of the Invidious mirrors if YouTube proper becomes unusable.
Or download it locally with yt-dlp and watch in a video player.
same, i think that will save me a lot of time.
I can get stuck in a bit of a loop watching videos, but on the whole I think YouTube is an incredible resource. I've learnt so many things from it, I think it's worth working out how to use it in moderation rather than just cutting it out
Yeah, this could be great for productivity.
I just cannot wrap my head around folks who demand content for free. How do you think the people who create this content would survive if they couldn't do it for money???
Some of us are from a time before the web was commercialized. The answer to your question is we couldn't care less. If these people who make "content" as a means of making money go bankrupt, it's no skin off our backs. It will make more room for people who host genuine works on the web.
Then I have no sympathy for you. You want to live in a world that does not exist, and your desire to do that harms the very people you claim to support, the content creators.
Except for decades, and even still, this world exists. I don't think anyone asked for sympathy.
How can you actually justify consuming content that took time and money to make, without yourself providing any value to the content creators?
If there’s a logic I’m missing, I’d love to hear it.
I'm not who you were talking to as a heads up, but as someone who blocks ads, I frankly just don't care. I view ads as a security risk and as psychological warfare. If Google thinks it worthwhile to invest resources and manages to successfully stop my blocking, fair enough, but otherwise I'm going to continue to optimize for my own well being. Google will go on continuing to be one of the richest and most powerful / influential companies on earth, and the small fraction of ad revenue that the content creator would miss out on from my ad-blocking, well, cost of doing business.
I've stopped visiting Twitch because their ad's are annoying to block. I'll stop visiting youtube if the same happens. I refuse to engage with ads if I have a choice. I've given money to a handful of people on Patreon that I want to support, but otherwise I have greater problems to deal with than the small fractions of a cent that these creators lose by me blocking.
I won't mind if this change drives fundamentalists away from the platform.
"I don't care" is a logic, but it's not... sustainable, right? The current dynamic of some people being of your mind but most people being not that way works, but let me introduce you to the Tragedy of the Commons [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Or it will just lead to more sponsored segments and product placement in "free" videos. Every semi-popular youtuber already has segments where they stop the actual content and talk about NordVPN or HelloFresh or Manscaped.
It's hard for me to find good reviews of Synthesizers because almost every video about a new one is a sponsored video where the instrument was given to the youtuber for free.
I have observed a more insidious problem - the Youtubers that used to be genuine and down to earth are now themselves compromised by being sent products to give their honest opinion. The other day I was watching a video about this nice couple who wanted to start their bulldozer that was frozen in the forest and suddenly they pull out this "powerbank 1300" (name deliberately changed) and started a sales spiel ! About how they have all these gopros and iphones and look how many ports this thing has, and how it can charge the dead dozer battery blah blah.
Matthias Wandel today released a video about a Ecobank 1300 - I am shocked at how the content creators themselves have become a poisoned well !
These 1300WH banks are waaay overpriced for the amount it would cost to buy the individual 18650 cells (probably $100 worth of cells being sold for $999), so these content creators are shills and sellouts to these marketing tactics.
I'm hoping a large part of the cost is in safety. It would be grossly irresponsible to just string together a bunch of budget 18650 cells to try and make a bigger battery. It's junk like this that has caused entities like the NYCHA to straight up ban ebikes (cheap conversion kits for ebikes seem to be giant fire hazards).
Ad blocker awareness is still pretty low among non-tech folks. Google will presumably wait for some critical mass of users blocking ads before if pushes this.
Wonder what the economics of this is for Google? Would they rather have everyone pay $12 a month and nix ads altogether?
I suspect they still would want most people watching ads, considering how central their ads business is to their business model.
I am kind of on the fence about the content on YouTube being worth paying for but the website makes it so difficult to find the content that I am actually interested in seeing that it makes the whole experience absolutely not worth it to me to pay for.
Faced with blocked videos I would either figure out a way around or do something else with my time. No way I'm disabling my ad blocker.
This.
I feel exactly the same way. Majority of the content I actually want to watch is very difficult to find and the remaining content I get sucked into consuming would be better spent reading a book instead.
They might be doing me a favour by blocking ad blockers lol
I use another search engine to find videos on YT. Sometimes YT search works but often it doesn't.
I'd happily pay 5€ per month for YouTube premium just to get rid of the ads, but (at least in Germany) you also get YouTube music, so it's 16€. I don't understand this pricing at all. They're excluding all potential customers that already have a Spotity or Apple Music subscription - becaus who want's to pay twice for the same content?
Their pricing takes into account that not all users use both sides of the subscription.
Google’s ad business is looking not so great these days as they increasingly lose out to the walled off app gardens they can’t get into.
It’s generally not a great sign for a business when the focus of your innovations turns into increasingly aggressive ways to force folks to consume something they obviously don’t want.
If you use FreeTube it will buffer a second stream of the video started just before ad spots then stream-and-discard the ads. When you get to an ad spot it cuts to the buffer from the second stream while the ad in your primary stream buffers.
It can also optionally stream through mirror services like invidious that also strip all ads.
In short, you can -always- access content provided to the anonymous internet without ads without the provider being able to tell.
The creators even get paid for ads you never watched.
If everyone does this advertisers will stop paying, and we can move on from this failed experiment and build better microtransaction systems.
Never ever watch or listen to ads or give data to adtech companies. This is always doing more harm to society than alternatives like piracy or violating terms of service.
I currently have YouTube Music, and have looked into getting Premium a couple of times, because I watch enough YT content to want the ads disabled everywhere. But for some reason they won't let me. If I go to the YT Premium page, they tell me I can't do anything there, and I have to go to my account page, where of course there is nothing to do either. I suppose I could cancel my YT Music subscription and then try to sub YT Premium, but with notoriously bad customer support and a number of family members using it also, I kind of don't want to go deal with that also not working and me having to go through the hassle of getting everybody in again.
If they want to sell premium so badly, maybe they should actually let me buy it.
The only reason I watch YouTube is because it’s free and ad-blockable.
But why in the world would I want to pay to support YouTube’s toxic incentives, abusive copyright takedowns, and overall rubbish treatment of small content creators?
The day Adblock stops working is the day I stop watching YouTube.
The thing is it was youtube that pushed me to using an addblock in the first place. I was happy with umatrix, hell I preferred it, For the most part I did not mind ads, as long as they were served from the same domain. I put up with youtube ads for a long while but they got so obnoxious I started looking to see if an actual add blocker could make things better, it did and I have not gone back.
At this point it is an arms race. I don't think out right refusing to serve the video will fly for long, the next target is to make the noise(the ad) undecidable from the signal. They already sort of tried this, which made it hard for umatrix to filter out the ads. but they will get better at it.
Admittedly I'm not the target audience but for me the percentage of decent videos I'd watch on YouTube Vs the amount of shite on there is sub 0.001. If this happen to me I'd just not watch the video. I never going to pay for premium.
I "watch ads" when I watch on my TV because it's too much of a hassle to disable them. I just mute the TV and watch my phone for 30 seconds..
I stopped listening to the radio because of ads. There are podcast I don't listen to anymore because sponsors are so invasive. I installed sponsor block (which I would gladly pay for) to may youtube bearable. I pay for spotify for peace of mind.
I love youtube, but If I can't watch it without being pestered by ads and without giving all my information to google, I will simply do something else.
I would be ok paying for youtube premium if Google were actually not abusing their customers at any chance they get. But since they will spy on you, delete your accounts, cancel services, encourage take down abuses, I really don't want to put my whole life in their hand.
The thing is, even when I don't block ads, their shitty sites fail to load ads on my browsers because they aren't main stream. In case you don't know, your user agent will cause any google site to act wildly different.
i'm conflicted, because youtube is amazing and has the greatest content on the internet, its easily capable of replacing teachers and this is the most valuable thing you could ever have.
and on the other hand, i adblock anything that looks at me the wrong way. i'm not sure where to go on this.
i've seen some creator-based ads that i would be willing to look into purchasing, but that doesn't actually benefit youtube as a company, is it simply up to me to rely on people who have never heard of adblock as these folk steadily decline out over the next couple decades? i guess premium it is. i don't mind supporting the platform.
My main worry is not so much this change, but rather when they decide that this also applies to Premium. I've been paying for a bit, and run an ad blocker. I'm concerned that it will be too tempting start putting ads back into Premium and require ad blockers be disabled. Of course I'm speculating, but this is the scenario where I'm out.
I could also see them splitting Premium into "Basic Premium", "Grand Premium", and "Ultimate Premium" where one shows some ads and the other shows "minimal" ads.
I started paying for Premium when they blocked Vanced. It is so worth it. I kind of feel bad that I used Vanced for so long. The experience is the same, with the added download functionality but missing swipping up and down on one side of the video for the volume and the other side for the brighness. Plus I am ad free regardless of where I view my content regardless of an adblocker being available or not. Honestly, if you use the educational/tutorial side of YouTube as much as possible, this is as much a no-brainer as GPT Plus.
The thing with adverts on mobile, where the ad block hasn't worked for ages now, is I can always block them by putting the phone down for 20 seconds (or whatever length the advert is).
Having to do this for an un-skippable 20 second ad for one minute video, however, makes me press the back button.
That said, the new plays-even-if-you-can't-see-them ad-block-proof ads on desktop are annoying to the point I'm considering just giving up on the website, possibly going to the other places like Nebula and old-fashioned podcasts instead.
You can install uBlock Origin on Firefox on Android.
You can also install NewPipe or NewPipe with SponsorBlock.
Interesting how “free” seems to be going away with higher interest rates.
Personally whenever I find videos I like on YouTube I will immediate send them into yt-dlp and save it locally to view after the fact.
At this point the amount of advertising has become so pervasive that I’ve lost all care. This “monetization” game as far as I’m concerned is blackmail to creators as their content is heavily regulated by the platform and god forbid you say the wrong thing and then all the money you would get per view goes away but the ads will continue playing because someone else is going to get that money.
What a scam.
Ads take up my electrivity and time. They should pay us to watch them.
They will try and fail. The solution that will be left...is one that many will not like, especially if your personal and/or work email is on Google.
Inserting ads directly into the video stream doesn't seem to be counterable, no? It's not cheap, but might be worth it.
I've seen a browser extension that analyzes the video using AI to detect the sponsored segments, so detecting the ads would be probably even easier since they are even more disconnected from the normal content than sponsors.
Which one uses AI? The ones I've seen use crowdsourced timecodes, and AI seems like a better solution.
Sponsorblock can already block the youtuber's own ads where they tell you how great raid shadow legends is and to like and subscribe.
SponsorBlock works because those parts are at the same times for all viewers.
I'm not sure why they would fail if they really wanted to.
From what I understand, currently, the ads are distinct videos, which is why external tools can block them. For example, you don't get ads with youtube-dl.
But if Youtube used the uploaded video to create a new one, with ads injected in it, I can't see how adblockers could block that reliably. Perhaps you could build a database of timestamp of ads per video? And hope that the compute power required to build new videos with ads in it is too much to be done widely?
What am I missing?
Like, per video on the server stitch in ads to the video file before serving it up? You'd still have to have specific behaviours encoded to specific segments of that video file (i.e. clicking on the video during ad should link somewhere different than clicking on the video during the video), and that would probably be detectable.
I'm not sure what solution you are referring to.
Writing's on the wall. As soon as they make ads mandatory, a competitor with no ads and better support will look a lot more attractive, and they could eventually face an exodus.
That competitor will also bleed ridiculous amounts of money for years paying for infrastructure, legal costs, and rising engineering needs. That is, until they also start doing the same thing. Everyone here complains about what Google is doing to YouTube, but financially speaking this is the only thing they can do for now, YouTube has always been ridiculously expensive to run and hard to monetize, and with last year ad revenue not meeting expectations + the current economic scenario I don't see what else they should do.
Either the competitor has no ads and doesn't charge money, at which point it would bleed money, or it charges a fee, and hence would be even less successful than youtube.
Why would content creators post content there if they can’t make money? Where would the content come from?
How's this competitor going to exist without ads? How is it going to pay the bills? Massive bills mind you?
I would be happy if Youtube Premium contained some form of sponsor blocking/skipping. I don't wanna pay not to see ads, and then being fed them anyway.
What is the best way to detect if a user has enabled uBlock or Adblock? I wanted to do it for a project I'm working on, but many solutions fail.
Good.
> What is the best way to detect if a user has enabled uBlock or Adblock?
1. Don't.
2. If the user blocks your advertisements, then the user doesn't want them. You should respect the user's desires.
3. If the user blocks your scripts, then the user doesn't want them. You should respect the user's desires.
4. If your site breaks because of things, then your site sucks. You should build your site to fail gracefully.
On the flip side:
It's their site, they pay for the resources, provide the work, if they want to block people who block their ads, they have that right.
You are not entitled to my website because I put it up.
> It's their site, they pay for the resources, provide the work, if they want to block people who block their ads, they have that right.
> You are not entitled to my website because I put it up.
Yup, I absolutely agree. But if you want people to pay for your site, then you must force users to log in to use your content.
If you put your site up without a login portal then your site is free. Advertisements sent to anonymous users are not a valid option: they are easily gamed, easily abused, and easily contain malicious content. If you want to serve advertisements, that's your business, but do it to users who have clearly opted into it.
If users don't want that then they won't sign up to your site. It's a win-win on both sides.
I'm not trying to block people who use adblockers or make experience worse. There are other reasons why someone might want to know if some portion of users are using adblockers. I personally use uBlock.
Do you know a reliable way to do it?
A paywall works. Or rolling your own ads together with partners wanting to sell stuff.
it's a heuristic based approach, but essentially, you ensure that your ad-script would set some sort of global variable, or a property somewhere, and your detection script would look for that property. If it's not set, you have a good probability that the ad was blocked.
Of course, this doesn't detect element hiding.
To do so, you'd need to setup a bunch of mutation observers https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MutationObs... , and detect that your ad's container or div/image was removed. It's a bit annoying, but doable.
Lastly, you could try to detect the adblocking scripts as well.
Don't use ad services that collect user data and serve personalized ads. Find someone who actually wants to advertise THEIR AD on YOUR SITE, and present it as regular content.
If you are trying to subvert people's ad block, you are doing it wrong.
I don't serve ads on a website and I'm not blocking users who use adblockers. I'm trying to find a reliable way to detect usage of adblockers for legitimate analysis.
Do you know a way to do it?
By their nature, adblockers need to be undetectable by websites.
If you're just looking for statistics, why not go for a survey? It'd be more reliable than trying to detect something designed to avoid detection.
the end is nigh. tragic, but inevitable. adblockers are the only thing that make YT worth using. honestly hard to imagine ever going back to that site once adblockers are kaput.
I would paid for Youtube Premium if I could get it for $11.99 a month. But since I used Youtube TV in the past my price is $15.99 a month and that’s not a price I want to pay.
I once visited YouTube without an ad blocker - that was a ridiculous experience, I can't believe there are people who tolerate that and watch it this way routinely.
I simply download longer videos with yt-dlp and watch it offline.
Yep. I do this with Brave playlists.
It would be interesting if we could create some sort of digital Suica Card, where someone can load their eSuica up and whenever they visit a website that's in on the plan they can view the website without ads, without needing to subscribe, and the site would automatically charge like 3 cents (or whatever) to their card.
Maybe Brave works like that, IDK, I don't use it, but I would like to see something like that in Firefox.
Recently watched ytube on a different browser, the amount of ads is insane. I've also grown accustomed to sponsor block, skipping over ad content.
Gosh I hope Youtube doesn't shoot it's unicorn in the face. With the number of adds that the youtubers themselves sell, it's just a bit too much. I'd be happy for this if I knew it wasn't going to just be google raking in all the money to themselves but instead had some form of payment partnership with the creators that was fair and equitable.
All I see happening here is more adds overall.
Content creators receive approximately 55% of the revenue generated on their channels. What is fair and equitable to you? Bear in mind that the other 45% is not pure profit for YT as most of it pays for hosting, development etc.
One way to frame that is a 45% flat tax on the revenue that creators create for google.
Time for some progressive taxation maybe?
They could make it a tiered system so the low-end views pay more for creators.
Ie, 90% to channels for the first 50K views, then progressive steps down to 55% share for the higher numbers.
Progressive taxation makes sense when you're talking about actual tax, but why does it make sense for content creators? If anything, less popular creators cost Google more, because one 10GB video with 1,000,000 views is cheaper to host and serve than ten 10GB videos each with 100,000 views.
Anyway, I think we can all agree that both content and platform are necessary here, and letting content creators take home over half the revenue seems, I dunno, at least within the realm of fairness? Seems to be working pretty well for Mr Beast.
I occasionally get recommendations for videos of like 6 hour gameplay stream VODs with under 20 views. When I look at their channel they upload almost daily, 4-6 hours of them just silently playing a video game. I can't imagine how much it costs them to host one channel with hundreds or thousands of hours of video and about 10k views across the entirety of the channel history.
Kinda off topic - I'm not a dev at all, I'm wondering how inefficient it would be for creators to self host their videos? How necessary are the youtube servers?
Other than that I see that the algorithm has some value in showing you things you wouldn't otherwise...but I'm not sure that's actually wanted or needed.
How impossible would it be to have an internet without centralized video hosting?
Its about discoverability more than access. Access/hosting is just the expensive part.
It is just not possible unless you have too few views (and that is ignoring all the tech know how required which is so so far beyond the average person). Look at this Vimeo example (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28547578)
Try Odysee.
They can never win this war. Eventually you’ll just have an AI pre-loading videos as you browse and trimming them down to remove ads.
Kinda reminding me about browsing the web with images turned off so pages loaded faster. Do we need to go back to 1995 browsing habits?
As someone who regularly consumes YouTube videos with uBlock Origin, the only thing this move would make me do is stop watching YouTube.
Mission accomplished for YouTube then
I think they would be happier if I stopped using adblock instead. If there are many others like me, that means less viewers for YouTube channels.
All that would do from their perspective is save them additional bandwidth if you're not making them money by watching ads. I'm sure they'd rather you didn't watch and consume the product for free.
YouTube seems to be slowly forcing users to think about alternatives. For me, having ads interrupt video was the line I hoped they would never cross, and I see this as something that will drive users away in the long term. Showing me 4-5 ads for videos shorter than 10 minutes is quite ridiculous, and as a result my viewing has significantly dropped.
I have youtube premium but I still prefer ad blockers or other clients if available. The funny part is even with premium, youtube is not giving you the best experiencen others do
For PC i have sponsor block which allows me to skip ads in videos
For TV i am using smarttube, an unofficial client which imo better and more customisable than the official one. Plus it also supports sponsor block
let me shill you this wonderful alternative https://odysee.com
Eradicate malware injection through java script and google ads, and I will consider it.
Also, if it's not individually personalized, and uncensored. You know; How YouTube used to be in the early 2000s.
Give me what I want, don't collect my stuff, don't try to mess with me, and allow me to remain anonymous, and I would be willing to pay for it –anonymously, of course.
> “We're running a small experiment globally”
They sure do like that word https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/104325801/testing-...
They should have done so long ago, but I guess they had other concerns, like building a moat. Paid content needs to be normalized on the internet, because people expecting services for free just drives providers to be toxic in a myriad of other ways. And YT Premium is ridiculously cheap for the value the brings.
I would probably pay if it was a standalone service with an easy sign up.
But somehow everything that I have to do through Google makes me cringe the amount of friction I'll have to go through. Unclear whether this perception is justified, as I never even tried to sign up to YouTube Premium (though intended often).
YouTube Premium is one of the very few subscription services I use. It's easily worth it. Browsing through the universe of random YouTube videos about the various quirky hobbies I'm into is immensely enjoyable, and I appreciate that at least some of my money goes to the video creators.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Ad blocker detection is an arms race and considering how big YouTube is, people will definitely fight back and go very far out of their way to avoid ads. This could get really ugly given that Google controls Chrome and its extension ecosystem.
> This could get really ugly given that Google controls Chrome and its extension ecosystem.
It would eventually give them the smokescreen they want to pull uBlock Origin from the chrome extension store. A while ago they basically used their weight to remove most video downloading extensions and added language to their terms of service which all but says "no youtube downloaders" and I would like to say it cost them, because it should, but most consumers are absurdly apathetic and don't care.
Adblockers are a larger group, but in the grand scheme of things I don't think it will have much impact. The Internet as a whole is a very large group and even though uBlock has a huge audience it's a drop in the bucket.
It’s not an arms race. Twitch has already figured it out. It’s absolutely impossible to use any sort of adblocker on twitch. It’s so bad that the best solution to “block ads” on twitch is to use a proxy to a country that isn’t serving ads.
Unless twitch has some crazy way of inserting ads into the video stream, YouTube will be able to do exactly what twitch has done.
> It’s absolutely impossible to use any sort of adblocker on twitch.
I have never seen any ads on twitch. I just checked with DevTools and it seems like uBlock Origin simply blocks a script called "v6s.js", that is apparantly responsible for serving ads.
idk what to tell you. I have uBlock Origin on and without the proxy I see ads all the time. Either you're not in the US or you're just lying. There's a thread on the uBlock origin website with over 1,000 comments of people saying the same thing.
There's also posts their daily about how ads are not being blocked on twitch anymore.
"There is zero chance I am ever deactivating it or paying for Premium now, that ship has sailed."
Hmm, if google starts banning accounts they would deactivate it in a heartbeat. This is what I’m mostly afraid of when using adblockers. I don’t want to wake up to a banned account.
It'll just be more of a pain to watch YouTube videos but I'd much rather manually download the video with yt-dlp[1] than put up with this bullshit.
[1]: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
They need to maintain a balance of sustainability for all parties. That means not pushing too hard in any given direction.
YT and Alphabet may seem too-big-to-fail, but in truth there are endless reams of content and services out there vying for people's attention.
Does anyone have experience choosing from the many many options of OTP providers to serve original content? Every time I look into it, the sheer gamut of companies offering these services is overwhelming, seems impossible to differentiate and make an informed decision.
We all agree ads on Youtube are horrible. They waited until we were trapped there to turn them on. The price of Youtube prime is also insane compared to Netflix.
What's the conclusion to this? Should Netflix start a Youtube competitor?
Youtube Premium is €11.99 per month here, including YouTube Music. Spotify is €9.99. The pricing seems very fair to me as long as you make use of the music offering.
22$ for family plan
I would pay for a way to block YouTube entirely. Every smart tv, tablet, game system seems to have a non-removable YouTube app preloaded. I ended up setting up having to set up a piehole and blocked it there, but the kids will eventually figure out a work around.
Buy Apple devices. Don't install the YouTube app and if you want add YouTube.com to the parental controls.
Can ad blockers block ads on YouTube?
Yes, quite well.
Some of them yes. From YouTube website at least. Not from YouTube app as far as I’m aware.
The app -> use ReVanced as a drop in replacement for the app (has ads removed)
I use combination of firefox with uBO and blokada on android. I believe it would work the same without blokada.
Firefox works in the background, you can stream music/podcasts with phone screen off and no adds.
Well, sort of. Ads that are included in the video content, need SponaorBlock instead of a Classic adblocker like uBlock Origin
Ads, the way are made today, totally destroy the experience, therefore I'm prepared to say good riddance to YT. Also, good luck with that; this will only mean that once there is enough demand, a video will be downloaded and shared through bittorrent.
What are two of the most annoying things with modern services? 1) Subscription Fatigue 2) Ads.
Let me tell you what come next: Advertising for premium youtube subscription.
YouTube ReVanced is magic and has better features than Premium.
[0] https://github.com/revanced/revanced-manager
> A YouTube spokesperson confirmed this experiment and said the company urges viewers to try YouTube Premium or allow ads on the platform.
Cutting off users access unless they do something is not "urging."
> Cutting off users access unless they do something is not "urging."
The company urges all users to do that, it is also experimenting with doing more than urging. The description quoted was exactly accurate.
Urges and also cuts! Cutting is a kind of urging! "Extreme urging" if you will.
I got tired of keeping up the arms race with ad blockers. So now I just pay them. So, it worked on me I guess. I watch youtube more than Netflix and I pay for that every month too.
What effort is required on your part to keep up? I have had uBlock Origin for years and it keeps itself updated. I don't think I ever see ads.
Is there an ad-blocker that simply blurs and silences the ads on YouTube?
Sponsorblock effectively does this- it fast-forwards the parts of the video marked by other users as advertisement.
I hope they succeed.
For years I've had an ad-blocker installed and that's the only way I can stand YouTube, in which I spend WAY too much hours on.
It would be nice of them to help me overcome my addiction and make me quit.
Ironically, I would be positively excited about Youtube really forcing ads by detecting and blocking adblockers. It would be the most effective measure against my high Youtube consumption.
The YouTube app is a lousy user experience. The ads are the most intrusive and irrelevant of any service since commercial TV. For those reasons alone I would never become a paying customer. What’s worse is they have established themselves as yet another guardian of ideas. Content creators have to be careful not to talk about topics that are deemed out of line by the current msm and liberal zeitgeist. They could have been a great venue for debate during covid for example, but they censored and deplatformed world renowned scientists and doctors who dared question the cdc and wh. YouTube has the best content and I suffer through their UX to consume it but would leave as soon as there is an alternative
Even if they were willing to pay $12 per month to hide ads, YouTube Premium is not available in all countries, so those people would have to use an adblocker.
It seems like youtube is ripe to be disrupted by someone. Video hosting isn't as hard as it once was, ads are invasive, and yt is just the middleman not the content creators.
Video hosting is extremely expensive. Look at the pricing of anyone who provides such base services (https://www.cloudflare.com/en-in/products/cloudflare-stream/) or alternate providers like Vimeo (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28547578).
Live streaming is very different than recorded video - but yes its relatively expensive.
But that is very different from early youtube days where there basically wasn't off the shelf solution. That is a huge difference.
Cloudflare Stream is both recorded and live streaming. Live streaming was actually added somewhat recently.
Maybe they should drop the price by like 6x while they're at it.
I don't care that it's cheaper than a Starbucks coffee. It's ... not worth it at this price.
So let’s get talking about ways to move away from YouTube. Are there any surviving competitors? Any tech tricks we can use to beat them?
I won’t pay them and I won’t watch their ads.
the closest alternative to Youtube I have seen is Odysee (formerly known as LBRY) https://odysee.com/
it reminds me of the old youtube experience. I like that their ads are images and banners rather than video interruptions. the content and viewerbase are a bit limited at the moment but that can easily change.
Until someone builds a better blocker to the anti-ad blocker
Sounds like Google is starting to wonder what it is going to do to maintain profits in a world where it can no longer print money from search.
I generally like to pay for services I use, but I just dislike google so much. I wish YouTube was separate so I could subscribe guilt free :(
No problem, I'll start downloading them.
Oh cool! I need help curing my addiction and I'm optimistic that this would do it for me.
I'm only half joking.
"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product."
Don't remember who said it.
So, bought subscription for Nebula for year (maybe should have gone woth Curiosity stream bundle).
Seems about time to download all of my playlists. Good by you beautiful era of the internet.
the more the web is controlled by the big tech, the more it will become a feudal space
Huh. If this ends up blocking youtube for me entirely, I'll probably be happy.
There will be ways to circumvent this and if I need to write one myself.
I think aside from everything that's been mentioned already, i feel that companies are being very manipulative about these things.
The games industry is a good example, they tune many games so that they're less fun and then try to upsell you some way to circumvent the less fun parts.
I feel the same is true for youtube, twitch etc.
I used to watch both without adblock, the amount of ads were generally okay. I didn't mind them much.
Now i feel they've become unbearable in number and style. Especially on youtube, where they often need interaction or they will run for 2+ minutes.
So watching it on TV is like some clicker exercise with the remote every 3 minutes. Many ads are also unskippable now and much louder than the content watched, they come at bad timings and interrupt the flow.
Have they tuned this to oblivion so their product sucks on purpose without subscribing?
Great I'm spending way too much time on that platform anyway!
My problem with Youtube Premium is that it doesn't work if you are incognito. I don't understand why I need to sell my data if I am paying for a service. If I watch a cute animal video on a whim, I would get inundated with animal videos.
I guess it's time to finally deal with my youtube addiction.
I wonder if running PiHole would be a good work-around?
lol who wasn't expecting this with manifest 3?
That isn't going to happen for me.
seems like Google is running dry here
enshitification
I used to use Premium, but then I stopped because I don't get anything in return. Now it's just extortion from a criminal who says "pay money or you'll watch a lot of terrible ads". What I get is third-party clients (on my phone) or plugins on my PC: - can be removed from the subscriptions feed: community messages (I came to watch videos, not read posts). - remove premieres (announcements, when it comes out then I'll watch it). - remove short videos - delete broadcasts - choose to download h264 (because few laptops and phones support AV1, which is currently decoded by the processor, heating the device and draining batteries) - disable video track downloading if you need only sound (including in the terrible YouTube music) - view dislikes - disable translation of video titles. It's annoying when the title is in English or, for example, my native language, and the video turns out to be in Vietnamese, Indian, and doesn't have an additional audio track or at least subtitles. - Blocking video channels I don't like - blocking videos with titles in a language that is not interesting or pleasant to my ears (for example, Indian or Vietnamese). - sponsor block (integrated advertising, as in ltt, half of the video is advertising), and this is with mediocre content that is better prepared by blockchain games with a much smaller budget. - selection of video quality, without resetting the settings - setting the subtitle position (top/bottom) - downloading videos in open video and audio formats (for offline viewing on the go in a convenient player) - And finally, blocking the usual YouTube ads. There are many more small features in the mobile apps.
What's in it for me with YouTube? Nothing! - YouTube could create several levels of subscriptions. - Create your own sponsor block. If a video has embedded ads, skip them and show your own. Or in the settings, give the author a choice: either he earns only from integrated advertising or YouTube advertising. - All the other functions provided by plugins (and this is on the client side, there are no costs on the server side). - warnings about deletion or skimming of videos in my playlist (I have 40% of videos in my music playlist for 5 years, and I don't know which videos were deleted to find the originals). - YouTube can reduce its costs by banning uploads, or by strictly moderating stupid videos of 10 hours, which are looped 10-second snippets and the like, videos for cats, dogs, snails and fantasy animals that will never buy anything from ads. - For podcasters, making it possible to download audio and previews is already a savings, because there is no need to store a meaningless "video". And also big problems with YouTube: - terrible search and filter. - It takes a lot of computer resources. - You complain about the channels not being shown to me, but they are shown anyway. - videos/channels are blocked automatically for unknown reasons and complaints from the left heel of some offended mama's son - the same thing is shown in shorts
If YouTube closes the api and pushes through a manifesto so that adblockers don't work, or work terribly. Then I will use YouTube as a regular site that I will visit once or twice a month, that is, it will definitely not be a premium subscription, and there will be a meager viewing of ads. AMD has also introduced a new streaming board, and more of them will appear, and separate blogger communities will be formed that are independent of YouTube, and YouTube will have an outflow. Among my friends and acquaintances, almost no one uses YouTube anymore because it's not convenient. More of them are on social networks, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. That is, most of them will not even notice the death of YouTube, because it is almost dead for them, and they go there only when necessary.
YouTube user tests discontinuing use of YouTube unless YouTube disables ad blocker blockers
I'm too busy with my life rather than browsing youtube nowsday.
Not busy enough to not contribute this absolutely useless comment apparently.
At least they didnt have to watch 2 unskippable ads to post the comment.