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Because there’s a big difference between placing a tasteful ad or two on a page, and forcing me to watch 2 or 3 obnoxious irrelevant commercials while still placing ads all over the screen and making me click annoyance-optimized [X]s or skip options.
And I’m already paying for two multi-user GSuites and Nest, despite their constant efforts to make those services shittier and claiming necessity of annual price increases. I would be far likelier to subscribe to YouTube premium if every single one of Googles products wasn’t constantly decreasing in quality over time. Google home worked better in 2018 than it does today. They don’t need my ad revenue, they need to overhaul their performance evaluation because there’s diminishing returns on how many ads a person can watch per day and they must be approaching the limit if they’re resorting to targeting techies who won’t click ads anyway.
What's an example of a site where:
1. There is no option to pay to remove the ads.
2. The ads are obnoxious and intrusive.
3. The content is worth consuming in the first place.
When Newspapers of record are filled with 'sponsored link' leading to obvious medical scam, you know something is wrong.
I use YouTube Premium because of YouTube’s massive music collection; it and SiriusXM are the subscription services I use. I don’t mind paying for content, but what I do mind is the notion that somehow the website owner has a right to my screen and my computational resources. If I mute my TV or change the channel during commercials, it would be absurd to suggest that I’m “stealing” from the TV station. If I skip past the BMW or Tiffanys ads in a magazine, I’m not “stealing” from Time or Life or National Geographic. Why is blocking an ad on a website different? If I put a piece of paper over the ad, am I still “stealing”? Give me a break! Once something is downloaded on my computer, I have control over how the data is displayed, period. It would be different if users were hacking into systems to bypass paywalls.
My support for ad blocking is not about users feeling entitled to free content; it in reaction to the anti-consumer attitudes some website owners and advertisers have, which have led to degrading the user experience of the Web and increasingly desktop computing in general. Ads by themselves are not bad, but certain websites have brought the situation upon themselves by behaving in ways that are contemptuous to users.
If the amount that is paid to content creators compared to the amount of bucks that google makes, I'd agree. But its not 50/50. It's more 99/1.
I pay for the bandwidth not google. They pay toss all, they have local peering, local cache. Doesn't cost Google a dime meanwhile I have to pay for the bandwidth wasted from the advertising.
Storage, meh. Part of digital infrastructure.
The company pays YouTube for every person they claim they showed the ad to. You do not need to buy a product for YouTube & the Content Creator to get paid.
How is the advertiser losing out? Not every ad has the purpose of causing a purchase. Brand awareness. Easing buyers remorse. Propaganda.
If everyone ignored or blocked ads like me, advertising wouldn't work, and YT would have to charge subscription instead. That'd also be fine by me.
Most ads are also paid at a loss, by companies doing an experiment then closing it.
Youtube only brought the marketing around their brand of being the first platform. They inherited this position from the early days of the internet.
They did acquire it for $1.65bn circa 2006, then maintained it at a great cost. But the second on the market doesn’t stand a chance.
Normally when a business takes massive losses to drive competition out in an industry that's hard to break into, then once they're sufficiently dominant, starts to raise prices, it's an antitrust issue.
Whoever wins the online video site thing contest is going to end up making money one of two ways, subscriptions or ads. Idk that it makes a lot of sense to me to be mad at Google about it. If not them, some VC or something would have just taken the hit instead.
If all free video sites had ads, I think just on pure speed and scale youtube probably had higher costs overall anyway.
Advertising is not a reasonable way. A separate subscription, with a credit card interaction, for every site I happen to hit once a year, is not a reasonable way. Demanding a bunch of personal information is not a reasonable way. Trying to lock me into an "ecosystem of partners" is not a reasonable way.
Globally accessible, ungated, anonymous micropayments, with one or two universally used protocols but no central gatekeepers? Sign me up. Extra points if I get to see how much of my payment is going to the actual content creator and how much is being eaten by the "platform".
The core technolgies exist. All the pieces have been available for many years. What appears to be missing is will.
Meanwhile, I'll use an ad blocker. If you prevent me from accessing your site using my ad blocker, I will go elsewhere.
You don't want advertising, you don't want to subscribe, and you don't want a network of sites using the same subscription. What possible solution exists that satisfies your criteria, which are way more demanding than "remotely reasonable"?
This is just an excuse you've fabricated to justify your own convenience, stinginess and/or laziness.
... and if a site directly tells me it doesn't like my ad blocker, I leave. I haven't gone to the ad-blocker-blocker level. I don't think that's unreasonable.
For direct micropayments to work for sites that have users in multiple jurisdictions and do not wish to find themselves on the wrong side of the law in those jurisdictions one of these approaches is probably needed:
1. Some sort of international agreement to either make it so online sales of digital content is just taxed in the seller's jurisdiction.
2. Some sort of international agreement that makes it so that even if the seller has to collect taxes for multiple jurisdictions, they can report and remit all of the collected taxes to one jurisdiction and that jurisdiction's tax office will deal with divvying it up to the others.
Europe does something like that for VAT. You register with one EU country (Ireland is a good choice for US companies). Then you just send them a quarterly report with a list of how much you sold in each country and pay them and they deal with it. You don't have to deal with tax authorities in any other EU countries.
Another approach, which does not require any new international agreements to be made, is for sites to sell through an intermediary. You structure this so that the end user actually buys from the intermediary, and the intermediary buys from your site.
If the intermediary is handling many different sites they might be big enough that they can afford the cost of dealing with sales/VAT taxes in potentially hundreds of different jurisdictions. Your site is only transacting with the intermediary and so only has to worry about at most two jurisdictions, the one you are in and the one the intermediary is in.
You may not be aware that many such messages are themselves blocked by the default lists in ublock origin. Examples:
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues?q=is%3Aissue+...
For anybody who's interested, I just posted a question in uBlock's Reddit forum about how to stop using such ad-blocker-blocker-blocker features while still getting most of the rest of the features of the extension. https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/171rorw/optin...
Then I'll have to find out if I can survive like that...
I want to see advertising promoting environmental friendly products. I want advertising to promote cleaning up litter, but you don't see that do you? We have the tech.
Advertising, a blood sucking evil exploitive parasite.
I would turn off all blockers if they didn't play with PsyOp strategies of evil manipulative social exploits. Exploits that are replayed on kids, you and us. Of such that Google promotes on their network.
If advertising was clean, did not impeach on my privacy and just kept advertising to "just this video" I wouldn't block advertising. But they don't, wont.
They are vermin, evil parasites. But you don't see that do you?
That'd be a bad idea, actually, because advertising is a massive security problem as well as being bad for your brain.
Just a week or two ago they announced a WebP library bug that allowed simple images to own any of the major browsers. It's just not a good idea to let hundreds of random sources stick content on every page, even if you think you've somehow sanitized it.
You use YouTube once a year? Please.
Actually my usage is falling off now, so it may get too low before they get around to making it possible.