Hacker News Reader

It was somewhat amusing to see people who'd been saying "I'm willing to pay to support websites and creators, but alas there is simply no option for me" pivot into being outraged at the mere option of having what they asked for. It was always a clear post-hoc rationalization with no substance, but it's useful to see the bluff called

Your point about hypocrisy may be valid, but it doesn't seem fair to imply the new behavior is to give the user an option to pay creators. That already existed. The new behavior is removing the option to block advertisements.

Haven't we been through this before... If refusing to watch the ads is evil lazy freeloading/stealing, then so is watching the ads and not buying the product. If you plan to do the latter, you might as well do the former.

If there's a difference, at best it's the difference between stiffing Google and helping Google stiff their advertisers. Either way, if everyone did it, it wouldn't last.

You’ve actually taken the argument further than it can go.

Advertisers don’t pay Google by the number of products sold. They pay for Google to display ads. As long as the ads are displayed, the transaction is satisfied.

Advertisers don’t pay for customers’ direct purchases. They know that seeing an ad influences purchase decisions, even when the consumer is aware of the advertisement. You aren’t “stiffing” the advertisers by refusing to buy their product.

It’s really simple: Google can get revenue from advertisers or direct subscribers. Those are their paying customers.

People who block ads entirely don’t count as ad impressions and aren’t paying the subscription fee. They are the only non-revenue user.

You’ve got a right to block ads but Google has the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason. Nobody on either is committing a crime.

The leeches want to complain about their poor user experience but Google gave you a paid no-ads option alongside an ad-supported product. I can’t figure out what alternative is reasonable.

Yeah. Ads are what makes YouTube accessible to people who can't afford to pay for these kind of things. Hosting videos for free wouldn't be sustainable either.

> Then just pay for a Youtube Premium account and get all your followers to buy a Youtube Premium account. No one is forcing you to use the ad-supported version of Youtube

Google themselves doesn't want us to use YouTube premium, otherwise they wouldn't be charging multiple times what they earn through ads for the premium service.

I'm not convinced by that.

I find a ton of value in Youtube Premium. I share it with my family. Youtube Premium also comes with Youtube Music - which allows me to cancel Spotify. Premium provides higher quality videos where applicable. The amount of time I save myself from watching ads is already well worth it.

If you're a light user of Youtube - I would agree that it's not worth it. But the way I use it makes it quite a bargain.

Right, this is making me think I should cancel my Spotify account and get YouTube premium.

Is it as good as Spotify for both podcasts and music?

You might be jesting, I'll still answer :)

I don't know about podcasts, but there is just so much spoken video content and there is background playback.. so I actually use YT for such content since I have premium (not YT music).

For music, YT (music) has been at least on par with Spotify for me.

Search can be slightly confusing when the content you are looking for has not been uploaded by "official artist channels", but in the end artist, album, title and "go to album" still always work.

It feels they have at least as much content, probably more.

Recommendations have been way better for me so far as well.

Might be because my Spotify account was overfitted and had too many playlists, but spotify recommendations had become unusable for me, that was one of my reasons for cancelling.

I guess the killer feature combination is really just background playback + YouTube catalogue + perfect filtering of music vs non music content.

I wasn't joking, thanks for the response :)

> Youtube Premium also comes with Youtube Music - which allows me to cancel Spotify.

Oh great, a textbook example of using a dominating position in one market to gain entry to another.

If Google gets to complain that "if we all blocked ads, we'll all be worse off", it feels relevant that "If we all played along with Google's monopoly games, we'd be worse off".

Businesses bundle services all the time and they have done it throughout human history. Has nothing to do with tech or being in a dominant position.

If Google can duplicate Spotify’s business and give it away cheaper, why not?

Add more value if you’re Spotify.

>Businesses bundle services all the time and they have done it throughout human history.

Business try to secure a monopoly position all the time and they have done that throughout human history.

What value do you get from YouTube Premium that I don't get from using my ad blocker while browsing YouTube for free? (I also get 1080p videos on my phone with a safari extension.)

What value do you get from your $1000 iPhone that I don’t get from the one that I stole for free?

Okay, you wouldn’t download a car, I know you’re not “stealing,” but Google has the right to block you just like you have the right to block ads.

If you want an actual answer, here are the ones I use regularly:

- Download offline videos to the phone app

- Picture-in-picture on mobile

- enhanced bitrate 1080p

- background playback on mobile

- “continue watching”

- music streaming

Plus, I don’t have to install and update any bullshit or hacked apps to keep all of it working.

Full list: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6308116?hl=en

FWIW, I get all of that with a single Safari extension called Vinegar, which replaces the hostile YouTube video player (and its associated scripts for hijacking the screen) with a native HTML5 Video element, thus restoring picture-in-picture, background playback, bitrate selection including 1080p, and continue watching (assuming I'm logged into YouTube).

No bullshit or hacked apps required. Just a $1.99 purchase of a Safari Content Extension from the Apple App Store to restore native features of my OS that hostile JS on YouTube attempted to take away from me.

It’s a personal preference, but I watch YouTube heavily on mobile and streaming tv box devices, so I prefer the app over the website unless I’m on desktop.

I think the app works better, faster, easier than the mobile website. You didn’t mention offline downloads, and that’s a major advantage of the app. I queue up downloads for plane rides all the time.

I’m not going to use a desktop interface for my TV, either. I want an app that is designed for use with a remote.

So you found a solution to get around it, and you’re now part of the statistic that Google uses to figure out how much to charge for Premium and how many ads to play for people who don’t block ads. You’re that X% of people who block ads and don’t pay for premium but still use up Google’s hosting resources.

What that means is that you effectively increase the price for paying customers like me, and increase the amount of ads that people who don’t block ads get to see. It is mathematically no different than people entering a Walmart and shoplift roughly 1.6% of the inventory [1], you make the business overhead that little bit higher. Thanks!

Personally, I think for the amount I get out of it the pricing is very fair, it’s a trivial expense, under $4/person/month with the family plan.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/retailers-lost-112-billion-t...

lol, I have to admit that's an interesting argument against ad blocking. I'm not sure whether it makes me feel better or worse about it though...

btw, do you think YouTube Premium will eventually include ads? Because the same sort of game theoretic argument applies there, doesn't it? If everyone subscribes to Premium then YouTube will feel emboldened to serve ads there too. Maybe people like you actually need people like me to maintain Premium's differentiation...

and about your "shrinkage" analogy - I could say the same about you, assuming you don't purchase the things in the ads. I'm costing Google money, but I'm saving advertisers money by keeping my non-consuming eyeballs away from them. If Google served me ads they'd just be wasting more money from advertisers, because I wouldn't buy the products advertised in them. (And the only counterargument to this is "well actually you might be convinced to buy something from the ads," which is basically an argument that I should submit myself to psychological warfare, at which point you've lost all moral high ground.)

That's actually exactly what Netflix did, and cable TV before them so it's on fact highly likely

Netflix added a cheaper ads tier, it still has the original ad-free plans. I don’t know why everyone insists that streaming services are adding advertisements when literally all of them have ad-free plans.

I'm the guy you're arguing with upthread, but I agree with this one. I've never seen an ad on Netflix. But Hulu, Prime, and (I think) Paramount+ all show ads to their paid subscribers. Although Paramount and Prime mostly limit their ads to promotions for their own shows, whereas Hulu sells slots to outside advertisers. (And this is ignoring the $100+ monthly cost of traditional cable packages that show at least a minute of ads for every two minutes of content, on every channel).

And ok, maybe those streaming services offer ad-free plans, but that's moving the goal posts from the original impetus of subscribing to the first (and initially only) tier of a non-free plan (e.g. YouTube Premium in this analogy) explicitly to opt out of ads. And in fact its further evidence that future YouTube will likely offer a paid tier that includes ads, which would negate the primary argument for using any paid tier from them now (if you give a mouse a cookie...)

You still lose Google more money than someone who views the ads and never buys anything on the ads.

You didn’t lower the value of Google’s ad network by being less likely to buy things off of advertisements, but you still cost Google 100% of the bandwidth, storage, compute, and labor costs required for you to serve the video.

Hypothetical Example:

Let’s say serving one video costs 5 cents in fixed costs. An advertiser pays 10 cents for an advertisement to be shown to you. The average YouTube premium subscriber pays roughly 10 cents per video and didn’t get shown an ad.

Let’s say you never buy anything but watch the ad. Google got their 10 cents but because you’re the type of customer who will never buy anything, Google’s ad is now worth less. Because you’re such a bad customer Google lowers their ad price down to 9 cents per view, because we can assume that maybe 10% of people who watch ads will just ignore 100% of them.

That means you made Google 9 cents, minus 5 cents for fixed costs, that’s 4 cents in profit.

Now let’s say you pay for premium. The math is obvious, 5 cents of profit.

Now you watched the video with ads blocked. Google paid 5 cents to serve you the video, but nobody paid for it. Net loss is 5 cents.

I know the numbers are far off and made up but you get the idea. People who aren’t susceptible to ads are already baked into the market price of ads. A response rate of something like 5-10% for marketing emails is considered excellent.

If you block ads and don’t pay for premium you’re not even a customer. I realize that that’s not your problem, but again, it’s Google’s prerogative to refuse you service.

And you can call advertisements psychological warfare and perhaps they are in some way, but I don’t see how society would function without them. Basically everyone advertises, including on the individual level. Inviting your friends to a party is an advertisement. Does your employer advertise? And you work for someone who engages in psychological warfare? How could you!! But seriously, how do you develop anything new with the involvement of more than one person without the ability to evangelize it? How do you exchange goods without the ability to make your presence known?

As long as advertisement is moderated in some way it’s just a normal reality of living in society. It’s basically just communication.

I think I increased the value of Google's ad network. By opting out of viewing advertisements I would never click for products I would never buy, I increased the average CTR and conversion rate of Google ads. But it's a bit more nuanced than that, because it means less money goes to Google (advertisers who would normally show me an ad do not pay for my impressions), but it also means that those advertisers have more efficient campaigns (reduced noise from my impressions that cost money but won't convert into clicks or sales). That's why I'm convinced that when Google forces ads into the eyeballs of someone who wants to block them (like me), it only benefits Google, not its advertisers. In fact it will mostly hurt the advertisers. Sure, possibly it could appear to superficially benefit the advertisers by driving down the average cost per impression, but any benefit from that would be proportionally offset by the reduced conversion rate of impressions from ad-resistant eyeballs.

As to your question about living in an idealistic world devoid of advertisements... it's an important question, and I believe everyone has a different answer to it that reflects fundamentally different world views. Some prefer the comfort of being followers. Some want to lead. Some want to take risks and explore. Different people have different tolerances for the unknowns they're exposed to. Personally I don't mind being exposed to unknowns and new opportunities, but I want to have as much control over their distribution as I possibly can. Your analogies to jobs and friends are apt enough, but they fall apart as soon as you add a human element. In particular, my friends and my employers are people whom I trust. That's why I'm open to hearing opportunities from them. Whereas Google is possibly the entity that I trust least in the world.

It's worth noting that if YouTube were operated by a more relatable startup, or if it were decentralized with funds propagating directly to creators, then I would be far more sympathetic to its business model. But as it stands, the centralization of Google as an arbiter of payments to my preferred creators is a textbook example of a monopolistic middleman that's captured a market without adding any value beyond basic and commoditized utility. I would also note that I sometimes donate to Twitch streamers, and I subscribe to a few Patreons of YouTubers. My issue is not with them. It's with Google.

Oh, and one more thing... I'm not actually costing Google any money. Their costs are derived mostly from storage. And I'm not uploading any video to YouTube (though I've considered uploading an hour of white noise for every minute of advertisement they force on me). The only costs Google can attribute to me are bandwidth costs, which are almost always effectively free, because they're delivering bits to me over peered connections and sometimes even their own fiber.

>Then just pay for a Youtube Premium account and get all your followers to buy a Youtube Premium account. No one is forcing you to use the ad-supported version of Youtube.

I did pay for prime and learned my lesson. They can't leave this dog be, so with contempt I treat all thee

> They can't leave this dog be, so with contempt I treat all thee

This seems like a quote or paraphrase, but no amount of google/ddg/bing/gpt can find me where it's from!

I made it all up.. Sorry

That's awesome! It's very quotable!

Just to break your mental model ;-) I would recommend you leave the ad-blocker on when running youtube premium too.

By now it's more like an (additional layer of) antivirus, and thus you should leave it <always on>.

As people find more and more ways to make malicious online adverts and other online software, it becomes more and more important to protect against them.

No problem. I have Adblock on always. I still pay for YouTube Premium.

I know Adblock is “wrong”. I fully admit it. I’m not going to justify my Adblock usage by saying ads are morally wrong.

I should disable Adblock so services can make money. But I don’t because it’s too easy to enable Adblock.

The incentives in the online advertising industry are a bit broken, so there are a lot of bad actors out there.

Adblock is not "wrong". And you should not disable it "so services can make money". Would you disable your virus scanner "so services can make money"?

There's plenty of ways to make money that don't include predatory behavior.

Meanwhile, keep your security posture up. Make sure your money goes to people who deserve it, not random people who spy on you or worse.

Keep your adblocker on at all times. It keeps dishonest people at bay, and keeps honest people honest too.

Tell your friends and family to do the same.

> Then just pay for a Youtube Premium account and get all your followers to buy a Youtube Premium account. No one is forcing you to use the ad-supported version of Youtube.

"If you don't like the illegal version, just pay for the legal version" is an interesting take, but not particularly compelling.