Maybe this is a hot take, but I'm perfectly happy to pay for YouTube premium. It supports the creators that I watch and I don't see ads. I'd like to think that it also covers my usage of the service. For the value I get from YouTube (and YouTube Music) it seems like a no brainer.
YouTube and the people making videos on YouTube are ad supported. If you don't want to pay, it seems awfully entitled to then complain that you can't get unlimited ad-free content, regardless of whether that's been possible historically.
> I'm perfectly happy to pay for YouTube premium. It supports the creators that I watch and I don't see ads.
When I'm on TikTok, I get ads and yet... they feel completely unobtrusive. I also find myself actually watching ads on TikTok - they're relatable, fit into my interests, etc.. It's interesting too that a real effort at putting together a great looking ad is made.
For example... I will see low-end ADs on TikTok re: vitamins. Not interested but... wow! They are fantastically made (AI generated: both visuals and audio).
In contrast, when I'm on Youtube, the ads are obnoxious and have little to do with my interests. They may be political, they may be related to big pharma pushing pills that I have no interest in. There is little effort at even producing anything entertaining.
Also, if I click on a 2 minute video, I start off with a couple of ads and I might even see an ad in the middle. I might also see the creator start off with a sponsor AD at the start or at some point in the middle.
One site takes the user experience into consideration (TikTok). The other (YT) is a warzone.
I can no longer access the original article (they blocked my VPN...) but I recall reading it was a laughable $14 a month. I'm laughing all the way to the alternatives...
I mean, I'm not sure what you're upset about. You can pay to make the experience better. I do, and it's quite pleasant. Nearly all of your complaints are addressed by paying roughly the same amount you'd pay for Netflix, plus you get Google's first party music service with your subscription (which still allows you to upload your own music files).
> I recall reading it was a laughable $14 a month. I'm laughing all the way to the alternatives...
I spend less on YouTube than I spend on two trips to Starbucks. YouTube premium costs less than unlimited Kagi searches. The cost per hour of utility (in addition to supporting the creators you're consuming the content from) overwhelmingly pays for itself in single digits of hours.
That may be because you're blocking YouTube from using your personal data to target ads, whereas TikTok is extremely aggressive about harvesting your personal data with no opt-out.
> That may be because you're blocking YouTube from using your personal data to target ads, whereas TikTok is extremely aggressive about harvesting your personal data with no opt-out.
I have always gotten ads from YT (whether I opt in or not). Google is extremely aggressively at harvesting data too. The entire ecosystem is the wild west of privacy violations.
Google itself is literally known for that - it's their entire business model:-)
On the Desktop, it gets better with my choice of browsers and a couple of ad-blockers (uBlock and Sponsorblock). On Android, they remain extremely annoying.
As for TikTok... the constant warnings from Main Stream Media have me concerned. So I use a dedicated tablet. No contacts, Fake name, devoid of much except the TikTok app, 3rd-party browser and built-in apps.
I am certain that even on this dedicated throwaway tablet, Google knows it's me and is (aggressively) collecting data. It's what they do:-)
If that was true then more popular creators who already get enough money wouldn't add sponsored segments, and creators who don't get many videos demonetized wouldn't add it either.
But there is no limit to greed so people add them anyway, only way youtube could stop that would be to ban such segments and remove videos with them from the platform.
By the same logic I can support people in desperate need in a third world country. But presumably if you cared about the people you want to support, you'd be supporting them regardless and if you didn't care you wouldn't support them. So either there are YouTube creators you're enjoying and should support or they are elsewhere and you should support them there instead. Simple.
This makes a lot of assumptions in the same way that "pirating loses game companies money" - yes but its not always clear cut or an exact science. Pirating was also a big factor of Minecraft's initial popularity.
What if adblockers contribute to a video going viral? Or even sharing a video with family/friends who may not have an adblocker installed? What if I'm a content creator who uses adblock and now I share my content elsewhere? What if I'm a content creator primarily funded by Patreon and many of my viewers were adblock users and I move to another platform to retain my patrons and now YouTube loses money on all my subscribers who weren't adblockers? What if enough people are exiled that the go to place to watch new videos is no longer YouTube but Vimeo or another competitor? Social media sites rely pretty heavily on network effects and if enough users leave (Myspace, Digg) a competitor will fill the space (Facebook, Reddit).
The gamble here is that more people will subscribe than people who will leave. Which is likely true but it could have knock on effects.
There's a pretty big difference in that analogy, in that video game pirates literally cost companies nothing, as the data is served by pirates. Whereas Google directly loses money serving data for each "pirated" view of a video.
If you downloaded the videos and torrented/streamed them to other users, then the analogy would be more comparable.
I also share a video link with many, many, many more people than I ever could convince to buy a game. I might convince 2 or 3 friends to buy a game but I can incidently get 30,000 people to watch a video with a single tweet.
Think of it more like a loss leader. Costco sells hotdogs at a loss because it brings in more than what it costs them.
I'm sure Google/YouTube has crunched the data and came to the conclusion that it isn't worth it anymore but I also don't think data can even give a complete picture. Data can't predict how many people will leave vs subscribe when all is said and done. Results from limited rollouts are not guaranteed to follow in a full rollout.
If you block ads, there's a high likelihood that many of the people who are following you also block ads.
So not only are you directly costing YouTube money, but by tweeting it, you getting thousands of people to also cost YouTube money, thus magnifying your negative impact by many orders of magnitude.
It can certainly swing both ways but I don't follow the logic that if I block ads that people follow me block ads. It varies largely from audience to audience. If my followers are mostly young, tech-savvy individuals then sure many of them are also likely blocking ads. If I'm a big Minecraft content creator and most of my audience is 9-13 year old though? It becomes much less likely.
Given how few people continue to use Bittorrent these days, I'd say media companies have demonstrated an ability to do pretty well at customer capture and enforcement. Similarly, they don't have to completely eradicate adblockers, just reduce their usage into the noise.
I would assume that network traffic and server costs are negligible to Google.
In my opinion, what they are looking for is not to cut down the costs but to increase the revenue. Either by more people watching ads or by more people using their paid service.
... which also means that the Youtube subscription is at best a temporary escape from ads. It's rapidly going to become worse than adblockers. It's already started. With Youtube premium you still see "promoted" videos, ie. paid ads, in the feed. So in a way it already doesn't deliver.
Plus hosting your own videos is pretty cheap nowadays.
> which also means that the Youtube subscription is at best a temporary escape from ads.
Exactly. Decades ago, I remember *paying* for my first cable subscription. I was shocked at the number of commercials (ads) I was bombarded with. It only got worse... higher cable fees, more ads.
They can't have it both ways. I cut the cord many years ago (pre-streaming), never looked back.
I am not sure how this stance is effective, outside of market dominance, why care if users that cost them money to have quit?
I am not trying to be combative, it is a question in my mind, Why serve anything to users not participating in the economics that keeps the servers on?
Because there is a social element to watching videos. Losing some percentage of users means they will also lose some percentage of shares from those users. Those users may also tell people not to share links to YouTube with them. YouTube is a dominant platform for certain content but everything they do to be less friendly is something another platform can do to gain market share.
But pushing users that you can't monetize with ads into another platform can sabotage the economics of that platform in the short term? If that's the case, it almost sounds like a "win".
Yeah, most of the creators I really care about are on Nebula or I'm already paying them through Patreon. I'll happily pay for content, just not Google.
That would suck but still better. The problem here is that I am not going to give my money to someone as a result of advertising if I can help it, be it being advertised to, or paying someone to not force advertisements on me. My primary beef with goog is that I consider the entire concept of advertising to be bad and corrupt and I want to do my best to not support it at every turn.
They already have that, it's called "membership" where you join a channel, potentially get early access to videos and other perks, in exchange for money. Same format as Patreon, only native in YouTube and video-only.
For what it's worth, I know of only one creator that actually uses that over Patreon.
I really wish wikipedia entered age of video. A good chunk of my watchlist is science, engineering or occasional history. What better place to host than a rigorously peer reviewed platform of zealots?
When YouTube stops working with ad blockers, assuming it cannot be circumvented, it will be the end of my YouTube-watching days. I already stopped using Reddit when they killed off Apollo. These companies are doing me a favour by removing these time wasting activities from my life.
I trialed YouTube Music recently, potentially willing to hand over my wallet, but the app is unimpressive.
The video website will eventually have the upper hand by embedding the ads in the video stream like Twitch in that war you mention. Now at best you get a black screen while the ad runs and you block it.
I don't know how Twitch ads work (never seen an ad on Twitch tbh) but I suppose they would still need some additional metadata, for example for the player to show the button to visit the advertiser. TV-like, non-interactive ads would be a downgrade from the advertisers' point of view.
> Now at best you get a black screen while the ad runs and you block it.
Why not skip it? We already have SponsorBlock that works wonderfully. How would this be conceptually different?
The big draw of Twitch is live content and interacting with chat, they just serve you an ad and not serve the stream content during that time. How could you skip it?
Youtube can make it so that it stops serving content for 30 seconds and disable buffering when it's showing a 30s unskippable ad. People without ad block would watch the ad for 30 seconds so no difference for them, people with ad blockers have to wait for 30 seconds. The only way would be to predownload like a DVR and then skip the ads or blank space, which would get annoying fast.
Some people were using proxies and VPNs in some foreign countries that don't have Twitch ads served to bypass, but that's also been blocked now.
> The big draw of Twitch is live content and interacting with chat, they just serve you an ad and not serve the stream content during that time. How could you skip it?
So do they just discard the livestream while serving the ad? What if you miss something important because of that? This just feels awful all-around for everyone involved.
Ads always interrupted live video for folks without Amazon Prime. Then they removed 'no ads' as a Prime perk and added it to Twitch Turbo at $8.99 per month. Now they made it $11.99
To make it a bit better they started showing the stream video without audio as a small thumbnail on top of chat when an ad plays.
Because 95% of the streams are too small to be profitable but take up a lot of bandwidth costs. Microsoft's Mixer threw in the towel and Kick is bankrolled by online casino money. There's not much competition. YT live is okay but lacks critical mass and will monetize the same way once it gets popular.
What a dangerous perspective. When I visit a website and send a request for a URL and they chose to send back some data that is not creating a foreign embassy on my computer. There's no enclave in which their rules apply instead of mine. It's my hard drive and ram and the state of them is mine as well.
Yes, it's their data. But it's my computer. I can chose to change the font size, the css attributes, or even javascript functions if I so chose. This entitlement that many corporations display towards human people is like they think you sat down on a computer terminal they own in their physical store. That's not what's happening. If I don't want to execute the code someone else sent me I don't have to. It's ignorant lawyer-think to believe otherwise.
Right. They already have the solution in the form of the black box DRM "Encrypted Media Extensions". I have intentionally turned off support for this in my browsers so I cannot view "live" streams and commercial media on youtube. Seems like it's working fine.
If youtube wants to stop acting like a free video host for non-corporate humans it's certainly going to drive down the traffic. It'd break 15 years of precedent and usage. I don't think they'll do this. Instead they'll just keep pressuring for absurd legal interpretations, threatening the technologically ignorant, and only buy district attorneys to enforce their absurd legal perspectives when someone technical rocks the boat.
> That's not what's happening. If I don't want to execute the code someone else sent me I don't have to. It's ignorant lawyer-think to believe otherwise.
That's not happening. They aren't forcing you to do shit. Like do you imagine that they are taking you to court because you aren't watching their ads? No, of course not. They are offering you an agreement, they will send you their data that you wanted only if you'll also watch ads. You are free to decline. I'm general, most of the governments of the world have said it would be illegal for you to find technical workarounds to get their content outside of that agreement, but of course not even that is them forcing you to do anything.
you request an URL, you can not specify what content that URL provides. This is not a new precedent or perspective. It's how Internet works. You can choose what the content owner chooses to let you choose. Try to choose the css attributes, font size or javascript functions that run inside an app in iOS for example to see how misguided your view of choice is.
>you can not specify what content that URL provides.
You've always been able to change how the content that was sent is displayed. And browsers literally shipped with HTML editors in them for decades. What do you think night mode is in a browser? Reader mode? Etc. It has always been a thing that browsers changed what they displayed. But now for-profit interests and those who's livelyhood depends on them are trying to re-write history. Mostly so they can force attestation and be sure their spying and ads work.
> You've always been able to change how the content that was sent is displayed
No, you have ever been able to change what the content owner has sent as changable content. Browsers allow you to change a subset of the content. You can not change how a video playsback. you can not change a gif is rendered etc.
If the content owner prefers it can provide you all content as an image as many "document" sites do to even prevent you from selecting the text let alone controling how it's displayed or even if it's displayed.
This is a contract; they provide a content that you either consume or not.
Especially Youtube, you have a choice, free with ads or payed without ads.
When there was not payment option everyone was screeming "I am ready to pay just turn off the ads". well now you can.
If you don't like either option don't use the site. noone owns you free content with your rules. free content comes with their rules.
You can't be cheap and chosy.
>If you don't like either option don't use the site.
I feel the same way about the entitled behavior of Youtube and other corporations. If they don't want videos to be public then put them all behind the W3C approved black box DRM and lose any false pretense of being an open video site. They can't pretend to be open and then throw around their money/legal power to try and tell me my computer is theirs anyway. They don't get to chose what I can do on my computer unless I opt in to it by enabling EME DRM. They're the weird ones doing weird stuff. 99% of the web does not claim it owns my computer and the nature of how EME DRM is implemented in standards compliant browsers reflects that.
My behavior and way of displaying the website is standards compliant and completely legal. Google is the one trying to work around standards and existing regulatory frameworks that already solved this by using threats and disingenuous framing of the issue.
I’ve been paying for YouTube premium for a year now. It’s so agreeable to not have any ad or interruption when watching multiple videos in a row, on any of my device. I guess their nagging ended up working in my case…
I've been paying for it for years despite running multiple layers of adblock, because I use it a lot and they actually give me the option to pay (and apparently it's a fairly good deal for content creators too). I figure that if my ideal internet is an ad-free one, I ought to put my money where my mouth is. TANSTAAFL.
I don’t think that YouTube Premium is a great offer. I won’t pay $19 every month. That is $228 a year! No, thank you. If there was a smaller tier around $5 with a limited number of ad-free videos, I might consider it. But there’s already way more content out there I could ever read, listen to or watch. $19 is steep.
Does your region have inflated pricing on streaming services or even just YT Premium?
This wouldn't change the value proposition for you personally, but in the US, YT Premium is $139 a year, $11.58 a month (14/mo if paying monthly), and includes YouTube Music. Spotify for comparison is $10.99/mo. Though I know some people prefer other music streaming services, or as in my case just don't use that piece as much.
I also wonder how much cheaper Premium would be without music. I guess it's kind of hard to separate, since popular songs are on both and Premium allows background watching.
The YT music app feels like a poorly reskinned YT app. Impossible to get basic album info, song titles are often wrong (live versions not marked, covers appearing to be original, etc.). So many "fan" releases which are often just lower fidelity copies. And search is, ironically, abysmal.
I came the other way with it - originally used Google Music and had to switch to Youtube when they sunset GM. I already paid for GM so it was easy to pay for YT music since they had (nearly) every song I'd ever uploaded already available and migrated it for me, then getting ad-free Youtube videos was a nice pleasant surprise.
Not Switch but extend. I use youtube music for a variety of songs that would never be on Apple Music (covers, instrumentals, mash ups, tiktok remixes, etc.)
OT: in nearly every prior discussion of this, people mention that when they do watch YouTube without an ad blocker they get frequent long ad breaks.
I occasionally watch on a device like an Amazon Fire Stick or an XFinity Flex which does not have an ad blocker, and so I too then have my videos interrupted by ads--but the ads YouTube gives me are mostly 15 seconds, and most of them bring up a "skip ads" button after 5 seconds.
Usually the longer ads also offer the skip button after 5 seconds.
Some of the ad breaks contain 2 ads, but if the first one offers the skip button it skips the rest of the first ad and also the second ad.
For me then it is not really making me spend much time on ads.
That raises the question of why am I mostly getting short ads with a skip after 5 seconds, while apparently many others here got long TV-like ad breaks? Do they run different lengths ads on different categories of content, and I just mostly watch the kind that gets short ads?
Maybe the ads depend on how much content you're consuming? Before I got premium I would notice the ads would get more numerous the more number of videos I watched. And would start getting more unskippable ads and multiple ones. I guess I liked to sample videos and switch to a different one so it got annoying fast. I couldn't block ads on my smart TV app so I gave up and subbed. Premium also helps a lot when I watch YT on my Oculus Quest 2.
Like 80% of my YouTube viewing has been stuff I can watch on nebula. I would much rather give them my money directly then google anyways, but I’ve been too lazy to make the jump.
I've transferred to TubeArchivist[0] for my Youtube needs. It downloads my subscriptions for me, gives a much cleaner front-end for watching and integrates with Sponsor Block. It has the added benefit of removing other bad parts of youtube as well: tracking, advertisements, bad comments, recommendations, MrBeast-style videos and so on.
This is an annoying development with youtube; I would be willing to pay them $5 per month because they're providing the platform (not the content!), but certainly not 16 Swiss francs (which is close to $17) which they want to charge here. Or they could at least charge less for people like me who publish their own content for free on youtube.
What are you on about? A cut of that 16 francs is going to creators just as a cut of the ads you see goes to the creators. Platform cost is not the only cost and creators need to be compensated and it comes out from the subscription fees.
The vast majority of contributors has no commercial intention (like me), or pushes content they were already payed for intentionally for free (such as public broadcasters), or make youtube videos to motivate people to sign up for a subscription with them to gain access to more services. If it was really about paying creators, youtube should do like e.g. Quora where the author decides whether his/her specific contribution is subject to monetization or free. I don't want to pay a flat rate for contributions that I don't even want to see.
Genuinely asking, how do you expect peertube to serve terabits-petabits of video every day? Who's gonna pay for this? Bandwidth is not free, nor are servers; Mastodon works because text is relatively cheap to serve, but video is not.
Nobody will need to serve terabits-petabits of video every day. PeerTube is distributed, and every instance only serves its own small share. There are already instances that take a small fee for usage, so you can be sure that they will not suddenly disappear.
There are also paid Mastodon instances, and I recommend to use those, if you care about your account.
There is a producer/consumer asymmetry here that I think limits the potential of this to prompt significant gains in PeerTube. ie video creators are less likely to be frustrated by an ad blocker blocker.
Popular creators can slowly move their audience to PeerTube by releasing videos on the latter a day earlier. AFAIK most of their income comes from sponsorship insets anyway.
Some people have more time than money, other people have more money than time. If they make it take more time to have a free ad free experience it tips the scales towards subscription.
I watch youtube a lot and I've never seen one of these adblocking popups. I use uBlock Origin. Does this actually affect uBlock Origin for some users, or is it just hitting the people who download one the thousands of other weird "Super BlockAd Xtreme" type extensions?
Ublock is pretty on top of it but sometimes it can be broken for a few hours. My suspicion is that YouTube will do this cat and mouse game for a while until it faces diminishing returns and eventually it will settle into a stable equilibrium with only more tech savvy people blocking ads, like what happened with Twitch.
I doubt Youtube cares about Sponsorblock. That isn't used to skip Youtube Ads, just content creator ad reads and such, that Google doesn't get any money from.
All the complaints about ads are true, they suck, but how is content you enjoy supposed to be created and distributed without money?
Just pay for premium, or use something like PeerTube.
It’s unfortunate, but you need to put your money where your mouth is.
I hate ads too, a lot. I think they should be banned, but in not smart enough to know what can replace those ads for folks who cannot afford premium subscriptions so they can also watch important educational and not so important entertaining content.
> All the complaints about ads are true, they suck, but how is content you enjoy supposed to be created and distributed without money?
From where do you take it that adsense revenue is the most major, most important revenue stream for YouTubers?
Most content creators make their income on sponsorships and their own brands.
Apart from that, it's not like content creators aren't starting their own streaming platforms. See Linus Tech Tips Floatplane for example.
Regarding the distribution of content: Google has been more than happy to carry YouTube's operating cost from their quasi-monopoly on internet ads. In return, users gave them more detailed advertising profiles through the use of YouTube.
I actually don't want to pay for premium. Google already gets my data - why should I pay for the privilege of handing it to them?
> Regarding the distribution of content: Google has been more than happy to carry YouTube's operating cost from their quasi-monopoly on internet ads. In return, users gave them more detailed advertising profiles through the use of YouTube.
Ad data is not worth that much money, especially if you adblock all their ads. Every time you watch a Youtube video, Google loses money, why on earth should they serve their videos to you for free?
I use adblock, but I'm not under the delusion that I'm not freeriding off everybody who's not blocking ads.
Google and facebook, some of the highest-valued companies ever to exist, make most of their money from ads. The ridiculous SV software engineering salaries aren't powered by goodwill, but by a need to compete with the salaries offered by these ad companies. Unity - a company making a game engine - is working on a licensing model where using their ad network gets you favorable rates. That is: the revenue model for a game engine is to include ad revenue from games that use their engine.
If ad data was truly not worth so much, the internet would be better. So. Much. Better.
So your answer is, “Google has always done this free tier so I’m entitled to it forever.”
Were both know ZIRP ended, no need to try and ignore the economic climate just because you’re angry and Google sucks.
I agree this sucks, but it’s not realistic to just ignore the issue until YouTube is shut down due to money loss. I would prefer a different solution, also, but like I said, I’m not going to say I know how.
> So your answer is, “Google has always done this free tier so I’m entitled to it forever.”
Please don't try to put words in my mouth. My answer was perfectly clear and easy to understand. You implied that adsense revenue is a major income source for content creators - this simply isn't true.
As for why or why I don't want to pay them for Premium: Premium does not convince me as an offering. Price is too high and there is a distinct lack of features. I will use YouTube until they stop servicing people with AdBlock, then I am going to stop using the platform. (blocking ads isn't illegal in my jurisdiction).
> I agree this sucks, but it’s not realistic to just ignore the issue until YouTube is shut down
I really _really_ don't care about the future of some Silicon Valley conglomerate. But I see nothing negative about YouTube shutting down or taking a blow - it would open up the market for new competitors such as floatplane.
YouTube's MOAT is not with it's service offerings, but with it's content creators. These people will look for alternative providers if they experience a major drop in their audience due to this new monetization.
> My answer was perfectly clear and easy to understand. You implied that adsense revenue is a major income source for content creators - this simply isn't true.
Source? If it's "simply" not true you should probably have some solid sources to back it up. From the article YT's ad revenue is $7.7B per quarter. They take about 32% and pay out 68%. So they probably pay content creators about $15 billion per quarter, which is $60B annualized. How is that not a major source of revenue for content creators? Discovery or recommendations which is what drives traffic to content creators is non-existent on Floatplane, even LTT is still all over YT. In fact they use YouTube to push Floatplane subs for insider content. If they weren't on YT how would they acquire new Floatplane customers? By paying for ads online? To people who may not even know what LTT or their content is?
You have to subscribe to each individual content creator on Floatpane, you'd be paying far more than the $14/month that YT costs. Just LTT is $5/month to include some exclusives, and $10/month for 4K. YT includes 4K by default with both free and paid. So people who are resisting paying $14/month for all of YT's billions of videos are going to pay $5 to $10 per month for every single channel they watch in a month? No way.
I didn’t say anything about creators vs whatever. You’re putting words in my mouth. I said this all, end to end, costs money, and today ads pay for those who cannot afford premium.
Off you don’t want to pay, and don’t want to watch ads, your choice is to not watch YouTube. It’s simple. I wish there was a third option!
I think it would suck for YouTube to shut down, it has a lot of good content and the alternatives are much worse (today at least).
> your answer is, “Google has always done this free tier so I’m entitled to it forever.”
Apart from OP pointing out that that's not what was said: yes.
We have been trained over more than two decades to expect stuff on the internet to be free, bar perhaps the occasional sponsored segment. From punching monkeys to win money, to news, to having music streamed to you, to having videos - including music videos - streamed to you. All for free. The whole bruhaha about privacy? Pffft. You can get what you want nownownowNOW! Without paying!
And you know what? That training was successful.
Music television no longer exists. Newspapers struggle to survive - as does traditional TV broadcasting. Waiting a week between episodes? What is this, the stone age?
So congratulations to Google and other internet juggernauts. We've been trained well. We expect to be able to binge what we want, without having to pay. And without too much ad annoyance. We will no longer pay. Our threshold for crap (ads included) is also miniscule, because that's the other factor luring us away from competition.
So yes: I totally expect Google to serve me what I want, when I want it, without having to pay. Because that's what Google has been training us to expect.
The vast majority of the stuff I watch on YouTube would get made without any monetisation. I'm talking about people making videos of their hobbies or crafts etc. I have no interest at all in the videos that only exist because of the money (like mindless waste of bandwidth like Mr Beast etc). I don't want 4K, 3D or any of that crap. Blogs etc, including images, have been available for free for 20 years at least. I'm convinced that by now after decades of bandwidth improvements etc we'd have free videos in the same way. But Google went the monopoly route with YouTube. I will not reward them for that.
> I'm convinced that by now after decades of bandwidth improvements etc we'd have free videos in the same way.
If you can figure out a way to serve petabytes of video every day for basically free, then you'd be rich.
The simple truth is that bandwidth is not free. The numbers are, of course, not public, but Cloudflare published some stuff here https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world... that we can use to guesstimate. Google likely has more peering agreements, but it still costs money.
That's just bandwidth, serving video also costs compute (re-encoding the video in a bunch of resolutions is not free), and running the software to serve the video is also expensive, memory, storage to store said video, and generally just hundreds of datacenters around the world. You can serve a million RPS of static HTML on a crappy server in a closet for a few thousand dollars, but you absolutely cannot do the same for video.
Everyone seems to have misunderstood my comment. I'm not saying a service like YouTube can be free. YouTube contains tons of low quality, pointless videos. Literally "content" (they even use that word themselves). You're thinking of all the millions of views of Mr Beast or the countless hours of turnkey video content like ASMR that get uploaded every day.
I'm think of everyone serving their videos themselves like people have served text for decades. Do you really think your average HN blog post in video format would amount to "petabytes of video"?
In other words, the technology I'm talking about here is the World Wide Web. That's all.
As for encoding etc, that's dead easy and most people have the hardware at home to handle it.
Bandwidth isn't free; I never said it was, but people already pay for their bandwidth as part of their ISP deal. Why do you expect people to pay twice?
Much the content I watch would not get created by the experts on those channels, they would be working a 9-5 job doing less interesting things, or just not make videos.
Video in 4k or even 1080 is expensive in bandwidth, your arguments about 20 year old free blogs are dumb.
> I'm convinced that by now after decades of bandwidth improvements etc we'd have free videos in the same way. But Google went the monopoly route with YouTube. I will not reward them for that.
What's stopping you from creating a service for free videos if you're so convinced? Or atleast throw together a plan for this so someone else can create it.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind paying for Premium if it didn't cost as much as it does. I wish they'd rolled out the Premium Lite plan worldwide, but they just axed it instead, so it seems that it won't be coming back anytime soon.
I understand having to pay for ad-free content, but there's absolutely no way I'm costing YouTube CA$13/month. If this was the case, they'd have to serve me hundreds to thousands of ads to come anywhere close to breaking even. The margins on this have got to be extremely lucrative. For that price, Amazon Prime provides their users with overnight delivery, something that's both limited and expensive to do - on top of access to many other services. Netflix and other streaming services fund their production teams to make new content, as well as pay to license third-party content. Meanwhile, YouTube just.. removes ads?
I think that they could absolutely get away with a simplified $5/month plan (like what they did with Premium Lite), but instead found that being another one "just another $10 subscription!" company being more profitable.
they could monetize differently, without ads. let creators monetize it like patreon tiers and let users make proportional donations to their favourite creators through a flattr-like system. take the ads out and a place like youtube only need like 5 guys to run.
That is such a simplistic view, I don’t even know where to start with it.
First, your final paragraph is faulty, five guys (insert overpriced burger joke) is not sufficient for running “YouTube without ads”.
Second, how do people afford that if they have no disposable income? YouTube is unique in that it’s used for a lot of educational purposes; not just in school but people use it to learn how to tie a tie or do woodworking.
Thanks for trying, but there isn’t a two step solution for everything.
of course they'd also need lawyers, content moderators and stuff like that. but they should just copy the files to a new server, run elasticsearch on it and give it a clean UI.
It looks like you may be using an ad blocker.
Ads allow YouTube to be used by billions worldwide.
You can go ad-free with YouTube Premium, and creators can still get paid from your subscription.
> Alphabet Inc., the company that owns YouTube, reported that the decrease marks the third consecutive year the social media platform faced a decline in ad revenue.
They don't even try to say it's because of YouTube Premium smashing success ;)
Can I pay for YouTube Premium without my watch history being used to build an advertising profile on me? I know I can read the privacy policy, but I'd be interested to see if anyone has any evidence to the contrary. Overall I think the ad-blocking crackdown is good for both sides here . . . I just wish I could be confident that paying for a service ensures some level of privacy (which is not the case for things like phone service, in which e.g. T-Mobile sells your location data).
I thought that the money was "in my data". That harvesting the viewing/browsing habits offered an insight that not even my "wife or priest" could trade in value to Google.
This is why i subscribed to YouTube premium when it first came out. I knew this day would come. Google is the one sending the data. They can easily bake in unskippable ads for non subscribers if they really wanted to
If it came down to it would you like the ability to automatically blackover the ad while it plays and mute your tab as a last ditch adblocker? Because that's an easy enough final solution to the ad problem but not everyone would want to endure the dead-air or plan for the time sink waiting for the real video to start.
I do mute, yes, and have considered a script that would recognize and mute automatically, but my abilities are not that good. When an ad plays I hit the mute button on my keyboard and engage with something else until the ad has stopped.
This puts a question in my mind: Do we subconsciously remember ads that we ignore more than the ones we pay attention to?
as a subscriber, i am also very disappointed by all the issues i am having recently with youtube. this must be due to all the cracking down they are doing. it is also affecting paying customers!
you don't get it because all complaints have never been about ads, they have always been about the entitlement to have FREE content WITHOUT Ads.
Now that they have the options of having paying content without ads they all come up with the same interpretation, another fake moral banner, that Google is trying to tell them what they run on their device, a very strange interpretation because the message is not saying that, the message is simply saying "you can run adblockers on your device, but then we as content providders will choose to limit your content."
Personally I use ad blockers not because I demand free content without ads, but because on the vast majority of the internet, paying for ad-free content isn't really a practical option, and the ads are over-the-top obnoxious: they massively slow down page load time, terribly interfere with the reading experience, spy and chase me around trying to sell me the things that I literally just bought, and are often laden with malware trying their best to break into my computer. I never minded simple banner ads, and I'd be happy to pay $20/mo to have all ads on the sites I'm browsing voluntarily go away; that includes on Facebook.
So yes, for some of us at least, it really was about ads.
HN: where the 200K TC tech rockstar ninjas will wane poetic for days about why they can’t pay 15 dollars a month for YouTube premium but really need to use ad blockers to watch YouTube without ads for some ideological reason
You should really say that many of the users here work for companies entirely dependent on advertising. Its not that we are rich and can afford to pay to not see ads, its that we are rich because of ads!.
Nevertheless I believe that we can hate ads personally. It does hurt. But the truth does that sometimes. It's better than not acknowledging it and leads to better outcomes. The ideology gets the light of truth.
YouTube and the people making videos on YouTube are ad supported. If you don't want to pay, it seems awfully entitled to then complain that you can't get unlimited ad-free content, regardless of whether that's been possible historically.