YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers
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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.
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.
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
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 feel like that's not likely
I believe this is exactly how it works.
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?
Can you imagine the uproar if a mainstream website blocked screen readers for people with low vision?
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
Sure, as other comments have said, it doesn't scale to all websites, but youtube isn't just any website.
But yeah I'd pay to get rid of all the "this video is sponsored by brilliant/nordVPN/whatever".
Sigh.
(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.)
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.
Or hell, Youtube has an API; You can write your own frontend.
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'.
just like cable tv
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
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.
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).
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.
"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.
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.
Eurovision should usually be free of ads after all.
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...
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
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?
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.
Not sure how cursing at highly repetitive ads that aren’t relevant to me is a considered “positive”.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Being able to at least switch between some presets for the algorithm would be amazing.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Yes, same way you don't need a subscription to walk along a road.
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.
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.
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.
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 do agree with you, though!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Why blame the users for YouTube failure?
> 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.
Interesting. What are your sources for that info? :)
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.
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. :)
That would be a lot more tempting.
Its how the kids learn faster these days.. tutorial videos in small bites about specific subjects.
Some of those ads were truly atrocious for a child to watch, especially - if you're in Australia - those for WorkSafe.
(I recently made near exactly the same comment in a recent, related story thread - but it's worth repeating).
“Welcome to YouTube! Would you like to watch 40 videos on todays slaughter of innocent people?”
No. The answer is always no.
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.
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.
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.
What exactly are folks expecting here? Google to break out of the explicitly requested sandbox?
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.
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.
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.
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 some sort of encoded identifier that an extension couldn't generate, then they will know who you are.
And is it really worth 4x its price? I mean its just ads getting removed. I can tolerate ads easily.
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 wish there was more transparency around what my money is actually buying.
(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...)
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'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.
And
https://peering.google.com/#/learn-more/faq
And specifically the section on: "What content can Google serve from an edge node?"
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 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.
How are they incompatible?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
fixed it for you.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
- 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.
If you're getting served McDonalds at the world's largest buffet, it's because that is what you enjoy.
Fixed.
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.
So, if I really do want to support the creator, other external systems are better.
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.
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?
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?
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?
"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."
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
Do business lie for money? Sure. But fiduciary duties don't compel that behavior.
> 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.
Advertisers use their dollars to influence and make statements, also forcing stupid age restrictions just because someone swears.
It's 1984 in 2023.
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?
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.
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
Something has to pay for the infra costs.
Either tax money, ads or subscription fees. Choose one
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
And that's super annoying even then.
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.
>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.
They already exist. But some will be inconvenienced. Us pierats won't be :D
Where are you all getting $23 from?
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).
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.
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?
[1]: https://newpipe.net/ [2]: https://invidious.io/ [3]: https://ublockorigin.com/
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
0: https://linustechtips.com/topic/928915-does-ltt-actually-mak...
1: https://twitter.com/LinusTech/status/1486935690315112455?s=2...
Fucking with adblockers there wouldn't exactly encourage me to keep the main subscription…
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
I think they're doing pretty great!
Record proofits!
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.
This is an important point. How much money is Google making by being able to track and spy on YouTube viewers?
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.
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 have a Facebook-only Chrome profile that keeps Facebook from tracking me all over the web.
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.
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)
Why can't Google do this? They already have presence at ISPs
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.
If you want to skip ads your option is to block ads, not to buy premium
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
How do you justify this claim? How can advertising your product to attract customers be morally wrong?
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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...
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?
* 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.
So I switched to Floatplane (3 subscriptions) and Spotify. I have no problem paying for content. I have a HUGE problem paying Google.
Ain't nothing wrong with this, once it went free, it is hard to go back.
https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/9058809?hl=en
https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/7658599?hl=en
Never believe “I’ll pay if …” if you’re running a business.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.)
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
Want free peer to peer streaming? Hard to build a content ecosystem on that.
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.
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)
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.
We just need this country/world to collectively remember what a library is.
YouTube Premium Family is worth every penny.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 then use adblock and sponsorblock on YouTube. It seems like a good balance to me.
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.
Also, 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.
Around 5%
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 love YouTube and pay for it.
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.
thanks, but no thanks
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
YT wouldn't be YT if it was an independent company. Lack of competition in the field is a proof
Are you serious?
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.
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.
The problem is legal not technical.
(also, how is HN audience relevant in the conversation about the whole internet?)
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.
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.
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.
If you don't like that, you can build your own server and steam from that.
Forgive me if I don’t shed a tear for their hosting costs.
Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on anything related to this.
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.
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.
Most of the people and channels I follow are on Rumble. And no, most of them are not "right-wing" and fairly apolitical.
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
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 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=...
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.
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.
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.
But yes Ads are more about brand awareness than to actually get you to buy stuff.
and plants shouldn't pull nutrients from the ground, they should only eat other plants! incredible how plants are not sensible!
I think most of us make a bit more than 12/hr… so it quickly becomes worth it.
ADS is money I'm leaving on the table.
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.
I have no moral obligation to waste my time according to Google's preference.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
2 - DO vpns are blocked (almost) everywhere
Only if I get to pay for a lifetime of access with a hand-drawn picture of a seven-legged spider.
Your suggestion to cut the price is unlikely to strongly increase premium subscriptions, YouTube has probably already set it to a revenue maximizing value.
"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!"
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.
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...
It's also clearly not inspired from stuff I've watched, but from stuff announcers want me to watch.
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.
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.
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 would buy one, but I won't buy 3. And I won't buy even 1 when I still have ads every so often.
Sure, guess I'm dumb. But I don't care. Subscribing gets me what I need.
EDIT: Never mind it’s just the apple tax. I had forgotten about it.
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'll just keep up with the inevitable cat and mouse game with adblockers.
I like Nebula and I like its creators and their values. I loath Google and I can't stand by much of the content.
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.
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.
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.
Id argue a large amount of YouTube’s traffic is cacheable.
- 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.
* 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.
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.
How much would they save if "free" users only got 480p videos?
I'd be fine with 480p resolution.
720p is an acceptable low bar
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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 understand that they are in a bind. Not my problem, however.
I'd argue exactly the opposite, since over 25 million people pay for YouTube Premium.
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 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).
If you want better recommendations though you may have to tolerate some things that you may consider "spying".
I personally don't care for better recommendations. I just need a functional subscription/notification system and much much better search.
If you really don't want to be tracked by Google, you should probably consider not using their services.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
What I don't understand is why you feel entitled to benefit from this resource without supporting it in any way.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
So while you are correct, such investment would be irresponsible (in my case). In other words, responsibility is what’s stopping me.
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.
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.
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.
Most of what I'm talking about are concerts and music uploaded to YT by fans.
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.
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...
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-...
yes.
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.
I'm definitely not signing up for youtube premium.
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.
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?
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
That gives you an annual individual plan for $15usd p.a.
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)
But yes, the solution is definitely having a separate private gmail for those services.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course these will probably only work until reddit changes their API, as they announced recently
"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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Either watch ads, buy the subscription, or stop using YouTube.
Huh? They asked if it deserves more money. Not if it deserves money.
But also even for one individual that allowed ads, youtube premium is a huge increase to how much money youtube gets.
You just want to have the cake and eat it I guess, which is fine as well.
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.
For me it says > 120 hours and I have had the subscription for 4 months. So definitely making use of it.
This seems like a reasonable balance between having the internet be usable while also supporting the services I use.
But they won't, and I won't stop blocking their trackers either.
I shouldn't be stalked 24/7 to sell ads.
Until they have reached a critical mass of subscribed users, and they start serving ads to paid users too (à la Netflix)
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.
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.
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.
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’m not going to put on pants to watch TV.
Microphones are a lot harder to block though.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen
That old Soviet Russia joke has truly become reality, and it is quite disturbing.
Also don't work in insurance, it can be real depressing.
As they say: just because you are paranoid, it does not mean that they are not after you.
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.
(edited to clarify my delight. My intent isn't to fan the flames of fallacy finger pointing.)
Correct and I believe YT Music pays much more per listen than Spotify to the artist.
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 have no problem watching the in video Gamer Nexus ads and don't expect paying for YouTube premium to skip those ads.
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.
I use 3-4 browsers and because WFH + VM's for coding some incidental sandboxing.
(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…)
My only problem is the sponsored content in youtube videos, I would give some extra money to skip that crap as well.
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.)
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
It feels deeply icky
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.
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.
Credit-cards are not that common here in Euro-land.
But debit cards are, which also work, it's not just credit cards.
Trustly, Sofort, IDEAL
IDEAL is huge in the Netherlands for example.
Companies: Here's a ad-free version. Subscribe
HN/Reddit: Why are you asking me to subscribe? I hate this
Not on my dime.
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.
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.
There are several levels of ads on YouTube and paying for YouTube premium only gets rid of one.
Or just don't watch videos that are littered with sponsors ads and maybe creators will do it less.
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.
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.
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."
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."
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.
Very similar to cryptojacking malware.
I will respect their expectations when they respect mine.
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.
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]
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.
What do we do now?
- 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.
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...
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.
This is not good news, and it's probably not going to be a lesson in humility for the company.
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.
it would come back for sure.
A YouTube user with an AdBlock is highly unlikely to click on any ads making them pretty much useless. So why keep bothering them?
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.
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?
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.
Only Microsoft seems to be aware this causes Dutch Disease, min-maxing your monopolistic platform revenue is terrible long-term for you company
What about selling your gmail data? Selling your search queries directly to third parties? Forcing your maps navigations to route near advertisers?
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.
[0] https://gizmodo.com/amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-the-ki...
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.
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.
Just remember cable TV on the old times.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As long as the grandchild can't simply click "install UBlock Origin", they're going to be fine, revenue-wise.
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.
Where is that info available?
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.
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.
mpv urlA 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.
Because it will likely get harder and harder to download from Youtube, and the option may actually disappear forever eventually.
- 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):
ytmpv () { yt-dlp -o - -f bestaudio "$1" | mpv - ; }
- 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.
This is on Android / F-Droid / pip. I've hacked those specifically to keep yt-dlp and mpv as updated as possible.
I use invidious with Yattee on iOS/macOS/tvOS.
Total bliss.
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
Sounds like the situation is unchanged for you then?
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.
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.
It likely depends on the currency.
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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
uBlock's great but it doesn't work in Safari.
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)
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.
Personally, I would absolutely stop going to youtube if they tried to block me from visiting while my adblocker is active.
What if that is enough customers for that competitor to build a product good enough to also attract the people Google wants to keep?
They are not customers.
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.
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 will save them whatever it costs to serve me videos, and I will spend my life more productively. Win - Win.
https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions
https://old.reddit.com/r/Adblock/comments/10fgy9y/twitch_adb...
Downvoting does not change this fact (and if I knew exactly why my experience is different, I would provide details).
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.
they're waiting for manifest v3
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.
They will pry my ad-block from my cold, dead hands. I will sooner stop using YT altogether than give in on this.
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.
- 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.)
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 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.
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.
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 :(
I'm curious how does yt share profit with creators for views from paying subscribers.
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.
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...
> Does YT detect that the ad wasn't played and therefore doesn't pay out for that view to the creator?
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.
Also I'm more and more convinced that YouTube listens on my microphone for running water.
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 don't need YT, the content they host is not worth paying and I wouldn't have a problem to live without it.
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!!
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.
(I speak from experience, I worked for 3 years at an ad agency.)
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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?"
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).
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.
Before they had the total monopoly, they had very few ads. Now they have the monopoly, so they are extorting us because of it
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!
And we shouldn't forget, rando users can upload whatever for sharing, which none of your alternatives do. Kind of the core idea there.
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.
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.
this isnt about ads. it's just another tactic for forcing users to log in.
If there’s a logic I’m missing, I’d love to hear it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
If they want to sell premium so badly, maybe they should actually let me buy it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 also install NewPipe or NewPipe with SponsorBlock.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
Do you know a reliable way to do it?
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.
If you are trying to subvert people's ad block, you are doing it wrong.
Do you know a way to do it?
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.
Maybe Brave works like that, IDK, I don't use it, but I would like to see something like that in Firefox.
All I see happening here is more adds overall.
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.
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.
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?
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
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 sure do like that word https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/104325801/testing-...
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).
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.
Unless twitch has some crazy way of inserting ads into the video stream, YouTube will be able to do exactly what twitch has done.
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.
There's also posts their daily about how ads are not being blocked on twitch anymore.
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.
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.
What's the conclusion to this? Should Netflix start a Youtube competitor?
Firefox works in the background, you can stream music/podcasts with phone screen off and no adds.
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.
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.
But that is very different from early youtube days where there basically wasn't off the shelf solution. That is a huge difference.
I don't care that it's cheaper than a Starbucks coffee. It's ... not worth it at this price.
I won’t pay them and I won’t watch their ads.
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'm only half joking.
Don't remember who said it.
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?
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.