Especially when those interruptions take two minutes. I don't mind them up to 30 seconds, but their length does get pretty ridiculous from time to time.
There's no medium that's gonna make watch two minutes ad without looking away or trying to skip it. You either sell it quickly or don't.
I find the same with christmas adverts each year - I don’t do tv, but go out of my way to watch the adverts and get in the festive mood come December.
Personally I am done with indirect funding models where people burn my time and attention in hopes of getting me to waste enough money on something that surplus cash can be skimmed to pay for the original content. It's ridiculous. Direct payment or GTFO.
And I'm putting my money where my mouth is. My Patreon bill was $150 this month. And that's not counting direct payments to creators.
Nice!
I'm still not using Patreon but I "guilty" of paying for promising alpha quality stuff, subscribing to services I don't use deliberately even after realizing I cannot use it yet etc.
I think we IT people have a reputation for being a bunch of cynical whiners and I also think it is somewhat deserved so I am happy to hear that I am not alone in actually wanting to pay for good stuff.
If anyone wonder what makes me pay, here is the best I can come up with:
- stuff I use or can see myself using
- one time payments, no subscriptions (unless there is a specific ongoing cost that I realized must be there)
- tokens are a nice alternative to subscriptions (eg: $10 for 50 tokens that let me start multi-player games is something I would easily consider for a good game like Polytopia)
- not too expensive, once it passes impulse buy at around $10 monthly or $40 one time it gets significantly harder bjt not impossible
Personally I just use adblock, skip the sponsor segments and live with it. Sponsor stuff is really easy to skip in my experience, especially on mobile where if you double tap the right side it skips 10 seconds. You get used to how many taps to do per content creator, their sponsor segments seem to be consistent lengths usually.
Merch, it depends. I've grabbed some tshirts here and there that are comfy and not branded all to hell, couple of random knick knacks. A lot of it is indeed not appealing, so I mostly just send money.
doesn't youtube premium give GOOGLE a revenue stream?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/YoutubeMusic/comments/8s1b70/does_y...
If your answer is nothing — I expect everything for free, then that’s both unrealistic and parasitic.
Not my department. I'm perfectly happy being a parasite. I used to watch Twitch every now and then. Twitch introduced server side ads and made ad-blocking unreliable and annoying - so i stopped using twitch.
My life doesn't depend on youtube, and if they decide to shut me out or the platform stops existing, that's fine with me. Maybe other video platforms can try out other models instead of that effective monopoly google has on online video currently.
I've also already said that I tolerate non-obnoxious ads. But looking at the rest of the web, it doesn't seem to go in that direction, so I'll keep blocking until they kick me out.
So much for that misplaced and invalid attempt at moralizing.
"are they so terrible?" and "what's the alternative?" are not my problem to answer, and I don't even have to agree they are valid questions that someone has to answer.
I do not accept the premise that the only way content can exist is if advertisers pay for it. That's a false dichotomy. There is no such either/or choice.
I will happily live in a world that only has content that was either fully paid for by purchasing copies or subscriptions, or given to the world for free.
You attempted to paint anyone using this software or anyone complaining about the ads as somehow morally lacking. I say, if you don't understand why anyone would give away something for free, and only think of the consumers as ungrateful parasites, then I think that says something worse about you than what you tried to say about anyone else.
How do you feel about DRM to make sure content is only accessible to those who paid for it?
For channels that I watch regularly, I contribute to their Patreon if they have one. I shouldn't have to sit through a sponsorship segment in addition to that.
At the risk of nerd sniping myself, thinking deeper, I wonder if people who sign up for YouTube Premium do less random surfing on YouTube and instead focus on a few channels they love? That would _further_ concentrate their payouts. If true, then the 10x figure sounds reasonable.
Let - p := subscription price
- N := number of subscribers
- P:= total spotify money = p * N
In first approximation, let us consider that all subscribers listen to the same amount of music per month
- v := number of minutes of music per subscriber per month
- V := total number of music listened to = v * N
Then, by listening to a minute of an artist, the amount you add to that artist revenue is approximately
P / V = p / v
Which is a fraction of a non-infinitesimal number (in that first approximation)
You got confused by a fact that an infinitesimal number times an infinite number can very much be real
The reason being that people in the businessy genre already get 10x (~$10CPM) what a gaming channel (~$1CPM) gets because there's more advertisers and less channels. You'd need to know the source channel
Heck, youtube could even build in a patron feature much like twitch has with subscriptions.
Isn't this basically YouTube Membership[1]?
[1] https://www.lifewire.com/how-do-youtube-channel-memberships-...
In the past 10 years or so quality has largely gone down and annoyances like ads and sponsor shoutouts have gone up to the extent "Sponsored by Raid: Shadow Legends" is an actual meme. There are very, very few content creators I feel are worth supporting. This ends up being a bit classist as mostly people with enough personal cash flow and free time can afford to become full-time content creators but by and large that's already kind of the case if you look at the people who become full-time content creators. But I personally feel that if your content is more of the "popcorn" variety that people use to fill their day but don't actually value compared to something people do value then the world at large isn't missing out. If enough people felt they would miss out - they'd pay to keep it around.
There are plenty of content creators I watch where I would not be all that sad if they vanished and they stopped creating content - because I use their content to fill gaps of boredom in my day and not because I place any significant value in their content. Then there are a few I absolutely do value and I already support them when possible. I assume ones without a method to directly support them are OK with losing some revenue to ad-blockers and the like. I have absolutely let personal opportunities of collecting cash slide past me because I weighed the effort to collect it to be greater than it was worth so I assume the reason they haven't opened up a way to donate to them directly is for similar reasons.
I consider ads to be psychological warfare and something that should (but never will) be illegal if they are designed to be emotionally manipulative in any way. If a dry, boring informercial doesn't inspire you to buy their product then it probably isn't worth buying howdy. I feel absolutely nothing bad about blocking them.
So who is benefiting from me watching sponsor segments? Not me, not the content creator, not the brand.
I just skip them manually though tbh, haven't gotten around to automating it.
There are plenty of youtubers who do videos as a hobby with no money and the videos still are amazing. Then there are plenty of youtubers who only make 10 minute videos so they can get as many ad breaks as possible and add sponsor ads in the videos and the video quality and content is just terrible.
Mass market viewers don't care, adblockers get ad free content, creator gets their slice. We all win
And before you say "but creators have to make money too" - independent art gets created just fine without capitalistic motives, and I vastly prefer the patreon model, or just paying up front for larger content (documentaries, games, films etc).
(Although in this particular case, I'm pretty fine with the sponsor method with most of the creators I watch on youtube - there's definitely a line where it could get overbearing, but for the most part it's pretty easy to skip if you want and the brand they're shilling still gets shown to you over and over again so the advertisers aren't really losing out).
(Also chiming in with the "I do pay for YouTube premium" gang as well).
It's grotesque that they think this is an ideal way to promote fan appreciation. I mean, the music styles don't even sync: You could be listening to Bach, with a playback history that clearly shows a preference for classical music, and some idiotic teen pop song by some attention-desperate, barely known singer starts playing via ad, which if you don't click to skip it (say you're in the kitchen with your hands dirty while listening to your interrupted Bach) will play FULLY for its entire 3 to 4 minute duration. Just bloody stupid...
I don't know what the return on investment was, I always figured they did it as a way to show that they supported the arts.
Then you get the intro to the show, and sometimes a product spot. Then the show starts, and depending on the format (half hour, multi-part 12 minute, etc) you may get a mid-roll and finally at the end a final sponsor message, plus the studio (like CBS) would pitch other shows on their network, and the star of the show would also have their current movies and other productions pitched at the end, as well.
Check out Richard Rogue on OTRR or archive.org for both styles, the mid-roll and the post-intro roll with jingle, it varies depending on year of production. Their main sponsor was Fitch, as far as i can tell.
I'm terrified we're already well on the other side of the Rubicon
In my experience, it's the same with ads everywhere else. It (usually) starts out not being overly obnoxious, with just a "this video is sponsored by [garbage tier mobile game/earphones/vpn/whatever] more about them at the end of the video" and then the pitch at the end.
I don't mind these. They quickly get the name out at the beginning and then don't interrupt the video. What really annoys me are the ones that interrupt the video. At some point a few of them annoyed me enough that I installed SponsorBlock. Because I don't want to hear or see these ads, but i tolerated them. But once that threshold is crossed where I don't tolerate all of them anymore, why would I not just block all of them? I'm not going to unblock specific channels that are well-behaved to listen to ads for products i will definitely never buy.
It's the exact same thing with regular ad-blocking. Sometimes when I'm on a fresh OS I start browsing the web and only notice I don't have an adblocker once I visit a page with super obnoxious ads (e.g. google on mobile and realize there's only ads and no organic results for like the first 5 screens).