https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6175006
The reality is it takes so much time and energy to produce content and the bar is high that creators make it their full time jobs.
So either, they have YouTube monetization with ads or they do in-video ad rolls, "sponsored by Squarespace", yadda yadds. Or they literally include some product into their video and it acts as a hidden ad because they generate a story around that product.
https://twitter.com/GamersNexus/status/1280566684483543043
This is of course an old classic with anything Google: yes, you can "opt out", but expect your choice to randomly reset at the whim of a PM looking to show "traction".
The Youtube ad experience has become almost intolerably bad in the past few months. I’m considering just always downloading their videos to my local machine before trying to watch them, even though it’s substantially less convenient.
How do you expect Google to keep YouTube running if you don't want to watch ads AND also don't want to pay for premium? I understand using adblocker on shitty websites (and you could argue that YouTube is one of those with frequent ads) but then you should pay for premium. Just my 2 cents.
This means more people trying to advertise things can buy those increased numbers of slots which get consumed more frequently and are.
It's important to know and point out that the UX of ads is in part chosen by creators.
I choose not to log in on my work machine though, and the YouTube experience there leaves me with such a bad taste in my mouth.
Most recently, adds that don’t go away without user input. Ugh.
I’m not ready to cancel my personal Premium subscription, but it does have my considering how I can decouple myself from the platform moving forward.
And yes, Adblock, but not the point here.
So you still get music. But Google's branding strategy here is just odd and confusing. I don't really think they even known how this is going to shake up.
The ad part I agree quite well with. However, I find that Youtube's recommendation algorithm is quite lacking. I mean this is also the case with Netflix and other social media I have used so not just Youtube's fault (only one that sticks out as better is TikTok).
For me, it tends to simply repeatedly recommend way too similar videos. If I somehow happen to watch a video about aa tech review, my feed will be tech reviews and that's it. Heaven forbid I make the mistake of clicking some random political video, and I am now in a hole where my feed is full of right-wing, anti-vaxxers, and conspiracy theorists and so on.
In general, it seems like Youtube's algo gets quite quickly to the local minimum/maximum but then struggles to look around or away from it. This leads to very a insular and locked-in-your-own-box experience.
Yeah, every time I click some SNL clip on Reddit, YouTube decides I want all SNL all the time. But I find simply right-clicking a couple and telling it to stop recommending them is very effective at undoing that.
> it seems like Youtube's algo gets quite quickly to the local minimum/maximum but then struggles to look around or away from it.
I've observed this too. Sometimes I feels like I have watched every single synthesizer video ever uploaded to YouTube. But I don't consider that an entirely bad thing. There's something to be said for a service with an engagement ceiling. If I find myself scrolling too far down to find an interesting video, that's a good signal that maybe I should get off YouTube and find something better to do.
I'd pay for Premium if it didn't come bundled with a music subscription (and the price reflected that).
It's kind of crazy that this is likely the "normal" experience for millions of people. And that's even without considering how many channels also include "sponsored" content within the videos themselves.
What I really hate are the very long ads that you have to skip manually. Sometimes we play something on the TV while we're cooking so we're not by the remote to skip them, and they can be really egregious, like 15 minute ads.
(Someone's evil A/B experiment resulted in such a high conversion rate they couldn't stop themselves.)
Ads are going to be the end of us all if you ask me. Completely perverse incentives. Make people feel bad so they CONSOOM? Dark stuff.
Even with all of the pushing toward Premium they have done for me, the only values I even know are "you get the ad blocker experience without installing an ad blocker" and "we stop blocking picture-in-picture support".
I hate that ad blocking causes the channels I watch to not get financial support, but at this point I refuse to let Google be the middle-man and make money off of providing a purposely horrific experience.
Those are cheaper than Youtube Premium, for more exclusive content.
I've became super allergic to ads generally quite some years ago, not watching any channel on TV, just movies/tv shows streamed from PC. Can't and won't go back, ever.
I don't mind the premium to pay for ad free youtube. Also the free Play Music (RIP)
Now, does youtube also deserve a cut? Probably, that's up to you. I'm just tired of the guilt trips.
The time code takes you to a pie chart breaking down their revenue. YT ads are 26% and in-video promos are 27%
Whilst I hate adverts - it seems like a waste of both advertiser spend and my time, to show me adverts that I do not understand....
Google infers your language and other information about you and serves specific ads: "omg Google is so creepy."
I personally feel the best solutions are either ad-free services that are paid for either one time or through a subscription.
If something is ad supported, then the way to guarantee privacy is to take a pool of candidate ads from an ad network and rank them locally based on a personal profile stored locally as well and pick the top ad to display. These locally stored personal profiles need to be also synced across personal devices with automatic merge conflict resolution.
As you can see it requires quite a bit of infrastructure that doesn't seem to exist
Made me wonder if someone had found a loophole and was somehow making money from it?
If they de-couple them I don't know if either is worth $10/mo indivdually.
I’ve stopped using YouTube because of the crazy ads. And we tried Hulu but the forced ads were enough to have us immediately cancel the free trial. Thanks but no thanks.
Why not pay for YouTube Premium? At the end of the day, you need to pay in some way to fund the creators making new videos for you to enjoy (+ YouTube for hosting one of the biggest services on the internet).
Sometimes it feels like the overt ads trivially overcome by adblockers or youtube-dl are there just to be something extremely obnoxious you can circumvent and feel relief from while still consuming marketing that is only made desirable by contrast.
So why would YT block it?
You can at least watch what you want when you want.
That's the biggest bit - with cable you pay a ton and still have to watch a crazy amount of ads.
I will never pay for a service that includes ads even if you pay.
Netflix has other problems. If there’s one or two seasons of a show, you don’t know if the show had a proper ending or if it was just cancelled.
And for a production company, churning through years of work in a day only to start demanding a second season has to be rough. I can't imagine it's helped studios in terms of timelines.
That situation is unchanged from cable days.
And the Netflix issue is also unchanged from cable days.
My point is being able to click on something or search it and watch it is most definitely better than flipping channels and dealing with tv schedules and all that crap.
Apparently.
To the best of my knowledge anyway, and my own limited direct experience :-)
I'm actually very interested in how the vanced developer has made this. This app is pretty much identical to the youtube app with premium features enabled and ad/sponsor bocking/skipping.
they're free to steal it if they want
I don't mind ads and have found many things I've bought through ads.
I don't want the page I'm visiting tampered with.
I want to experience the site exactly like it was designed, ads included.
I like to keep up with ad trends.
I'm afraid stuff will break and that I get a suboptimal experience without me even realizing it.
I want to support creators and certain sites.
I pay for YouTube Premium so not an issue there.
> I like to keep up with ad trends
Do you work in advertising by any chance?
Well at least we can all agree on this one thing. How we get there without dealing with sites that load slowly, look like hell, and track me wherever I go is the big question.
That's my reason.
It seems to me the ads do a dollar's worth of damage to the viewer while only giving a penny of benefit to the author.