Even Uber is becoming an ads company...
Yeah, with youtube it kind of makes sense that the ads would be there. Uber (TIL), Windows 11, and non-media experiences/services/goods in general looking for ways to sell ads makes my skin crawl.
Just wait until doorbells play you an ad when you press the button.
If given a single magical wish, I wonder how much havoc I could wreck by wishing that immediately before someone intends to purchase ad time or join an ad network or whatever they mystically gain an understanding of exactly what the ROI is going to be for them. My conceit is that 99% of entities that purchase ad time have a significantly negative ROI because at the end of the day the only thing that an advertiser has to be good at selling to exist is their own services.
Platforms which require network effects to function like YouTube, Twitter, Email (deliverability), etc have a different dynamic. They're very difficult to abandon once you've come to rely on them.
Until the government comes in and mandates you need such and such light switch/thermostat/doorbell because of some regulation and conveniently all of the ones on the market which meet that spec are adware-infested nightmares.
You can get your own doorbell, but if everyone else has a doorbell with ads on it, then you kind of still have to deal with it.
"It's okay, I'll just text them instead of going to their front door." Oh they'll consider that too. The free monthly subscription is only valid when you end up with at least 10 ad plays during that month. You don't even have to push the button, the doorbell sees you and plays the ad. And your friends have an incentive to take just a few extra seconds to get to the front door even though they texted back that the door was unlocked and they're right there.
I saw a brand new machine for measuring blood pressure at the store and sat down because why not. It had unskippable screens demanding my personal info then it says “gathering your data” for a full THIRTY seconds after measuring my blood pressure which was conveniently just the amount of time to show me a commercial. It made me want to throw up.
I’m sure Walmart threw out all the old blood pressure machines that worked for 30 years and put these abominations in. It just makes my skin crawl how dystopian that machine was.
I feel like due to the VC-enabled delayed monetization that tends to happen with startups, we have all (me included) become convinced that it's sustainable to expect a bunch of ad-free, subscription-free content that just creates itself and teleports onto our computer, forever and ever. TANSTAAFL though.
For me, it was, in order:
- "Three strikes" and... what? Red alert! Let me drop everything and read the damn article right now, because it could be "three strikes and you lose your Google account", which is kinda big fucking deal.
- [Couple paragraphs later] oh, only disabling playback. Whew, cancel red alert.
- My kids will not be happy though the first time it hits. Neither will we, because YouTube + AdBlock is the easiest way to play our 4yo and 2yo music, without exposing them to the brain poison of modern advertising at this early age.
- (The next easiest one is NewPipe or yt-dlp, + some manual fixup, + an old phone working as an off-line music player.)
- (Also no joke on brain poison. The way kids react to an ad that occasionally slips by us is a perfect measure of how fucked up advertising is.)
- Oh well, let's hope NewPipe keeps working.
- ... also, what took them so long? I expected this so many years ago that I actually forgot this could happen.
BTW. is it only me, or is 2023 the year of "enshittification" of SaaS shifting into high gear? Like the layoff wave earlier, this also feels like suddenly happening everywhere at the same time.
This is an interesting point. Like, they're not doing it today, but ... yeah, I might checkout the alternative streaming services again when I get a moment. Because you know if this initiative doesn't make a chart start to go upwards, then sooner or later somebody in a board room is going to suggest it. Better to just get off of youtube now.
> (Also no joke on brain poison. The way kids react to an ad that occasionally slips by us is a perfect measure of how fucked up advertising is.)
My kids absolutely freak out whenever they see an ad. "What's happening? Is the TV broken?" I feel like their reaction is proof that I've done at least one thing right as a parent.
No affiliation with them, just very happy I made the switch.
The words likely to sum up this decade.
The era of free money may be over, but that doesn't mean we're required to present our gaping maws willingly as receptacles for the enshittifiers' effluent.
What's supposed to be bad about it. I'm still using Netflix and never even shared my password the first time. I like it.
- Charitable view: a very broad selection of productions aimed at smaller, niche audiences, so that everyone can find something unique they like.
- Cynical view: B-rate shit, going for quantity over quality, and hoping something sticks.
Either way, at this point, many Netflix users have long ago watched everything remotely worth watching on the site, and keep the subscription out of habit (or to keep access to something they like to rewatch). It doesn't take much to lose those subscribers.
Sometimes there really are good old days.
Google accounts are fragile like people; they can suddenly cease operation, for no known reason.
I keep everything Google isolated. It's all in it's own browser or container. As for youtube, it ~only gets watched on a dedicated device attached to a TV.
How is this easier than paying a subscription? You get ad-free YouTube and YouTube music.
I’ve listened to 1000s of hours of YouTube since I started my premium subscription with 0 advertisements. We paid a few dollars more for a family plan and now my father and grandfather no longer watch ads either.
If most people choose to do this, your premium subscription will start to have a few premium, curated ads, and you'll have to buy the next tier up to get ad-free again. Four years later, you'll have to by the next tier up just to get the premium, curated ads back.
I absolutely hate this.
This has never happened to me even once with any service that I pay for. Hulu is the closest, but they replaced a free tier with a cheap-with-ads tier. Their expensive tier at least once had "some ads that were contractually required" but i never saw them.
And I think if "most people" paid for YTP they'd be drowning in revenue so I doubt that they'd be desperate to screw that up by repositioning YTP as something other than "ad-free."
I might get flamed for this, but while I see the reason to hate and adblock mainstream sites that have awful ads and have no paid ad-free option (see most newspapers and TV stations, especially local ones, everything that has those idiotic bottom-feeding ads at the bottom of an article, Yahoo, AOL, Newsweek, Gizmodo etc.) ... in contrast, YTP is there, it's twelve bucks a month, I don't see why anyone wouldn't pay for it instead of trying to cheat. Not saying it's a crime or even immoral, but they don't owe you video content and trying to subvert the conditions they place on access seems like basically cheating. Kind of like not paying your water bill (when you could afford it) and just using the public restroom next door 10 times a day. Not illegal, but... seems like a bad plan.
First of all, isn't YouTube Music dead? Didn't it die twice already? Secondly, I don't know. I didn't look into YouTube Premium precisely because they're pushing it way too hard. I don't trust Google, I don't trust them handling ads and child-related content on YouTube right, after various YouTube Kids fiascoes. I don't trust people who are pushing their products/services this hard - so far, I was never wrong. Whatever curiosity I had about YouTube Premium, they burned it by the third time in a day I got interrupted by a full-screen "activate a trial" ad, optimized to have distracted people subscribe by mistake.
Not to mention, the way YouTube Premium story evolves, this really feels like extortion. It technically isn't, and they're in their rights, but perception matters - and because of that, I'm willing to spend a lot of effort, and even a lot of money with someone else, just to not have to deal with YouTube Premium, YouTube ads and other YouTube bullshit, while retaining easy access on the relatively infrequent occasion I want to play something from their catalogue.
Nope. Never died. I've been using it for at least a year.
I think the West is escalating its war on user control of anything networkable, and content blocking is a security hole. Western governments prefer that everyone be using the same few monitorable, censorable, and compliant communication mediums in the same way, and is ignoring or supporting massive private media/tech businesses when needed in order to reach that goal.
1. Make everyone pay
2. Make everyone either watch ads or pay, user's choice
3. Eliminate all ads. Since there would be little reason to sign up for YTP once ads are eliminated, they're going to have to have "Pledge drives" where they try to beg you to pay just out of generosity, to support a public service for all. Somehow this seems like it'll never not lose huge amounts of money.
4. (sort of the status quo up till now) Nerds get to block ads, and are subsidized by Premium subscribers and suckers.
Admittedly option 3 sounds stupid, I just can't think of any other options for YouTube where it doesn't cease to exist.
This is, in fact, a point raised by many commenters in the thread - it's very likely that Premium will stop being ad-free once it gains a large enough user base. See also: cable TV, or any other paid-for medium whose initial value proposition was... "we charge you for it, but there are no ads!".
Option 3. - nah, can't imagine it either.
Option 4. - that would be going back to the "good years". I don't think it's possible for YouTube - they'd have to somehow undo or reverse the pressures that got them to the situation today. See also: image hosting service cycle - they start bullshit-free, then they get progressively worse, but it's only when they go past the "nerds block ads, whales pay, suckers get ads" stage - when they disturb that balance - that they die.
I mean... then you stop paying and download an ad blocker. Why not enjoy the utopia of paid commercial free video content while it lasts. It's not like you're locked in somehow.
This isn’t worth 40 cents a day to you? 20 cents per child per day? You can’t even get a banana for 20 cents these days.
There were 4 "commercial breaks" of 2, unskippable 30 second ads. So, 4 minutes extra.
That's an extra 40% of the original video length (10 minutes). That's 30% of the total length (14 minutes).
It's almost exactly the same as broadcast tv, maybe slightly high? TV averages 12-20 minutes per 60 of tv being ads.
Not really sure what to do with that. It feels like I should be upset, but really, it's proportionate to what already exists and I'm only upset because it's worse than it was 10 years ago.
We're PAYING for our kids to become desensitized to attention-vampiricity and we're unsure if it is ok to be upset? Yes!
Your argument is a different thing. Valid as well, but completely different.
There's far too many people in "business" today who think they provide anything of any real, determinable value to me rather then a passing fancy which will be easily replaced or discarded.
And this doesn't just apply to the content hosters: it also applies to their advertisers. There is nothing of value being advertised these days. It's all misrepresented junk, when it's not outright scams. It isn't worth ever exposing yourself to.
My first thought upon hearing this was "oh, I guess my time lost to youtube-dl + mpv of those few channels I have bookmarked will finally be reclaimed!" (assuming this breaks it)
This move makes zero sense on their part. Cutting off your addicts is a horrible approach to being a drug dealer. You always keep them hooked to your supply, if you wholly interrupt it they'll quickly seek replacement. That's literally what created the illicit opioid crisis - folks lost their prescription opioids and immediately pivoted to street dealers.
Surely youtube has better options than outright blocking users of adblockers... Why wouldn't you first just restrict the quality of videos they can access to extremely low-res. It lessens the bandwidth burden on you, and may be enough to keep them under your spell and away from the competitors supply.
I use an ad blocker. If I can no longer block ads on YouTube, yes I will just stop using YouTube, or use an Invidious/Piped instance. I think your mistake is believing everyone who uses ad-block also believes ad-free YouTube is worth paying for. I do not.
Further, if Invidious, Piped, NewPipe, and yt-dlp stop working as well, I will simply just watch drastically less YouTube, which is what Google wants.
> Somebody has to pay something for youtube to be viable.
I don't care. Would I care if YouTube was run by a small company that didn't employ dark patterns or fuel unhealthy addiction of innappropriate content in kids? Probably, but YouTube is run by megacorp, so no, I don't care about their server costs.
No, they are saying that they will not "lose your business" because there was no business in the first place, which is true.
Maybe the mistake of these conglomerates is getting people accustomed to a certain level of service for free.
The advertised rates are currently $5/month or $50/year.
Social media does it (Reddit, Twitter). Video games do it (COD, yearly releases, DLC). eCommerce does it (Walmart, Amazon). IaaS does it (Heroku).
Don't give them the benefit that it's a 'mistake', it's very intentional. CAC is a metric used by all tech companies and is calculated to build network effects and large user-bases. I find it unethical and borderline fraudulent to build these community pillars and then defile them for profit. We'll be left with absolutely nothing free in life, no town squares and no transfer of information without fees.
Whether you or someone else can afford $10/mo is completely irrelevant.
So, on the one hand you have people who use ad blockers. The first retort that comes to mind here is: Well, we'll take our business elsewhere. Which is odd because without ads they aren't paying and them leaving is the goal.
Of course on the other hand ... when I read the title my thoughts weren't that I would be okay because I don't ad block youtube. My thought wasn't that I should buy youtube premium to avoid ads. My thought WAS that if I ever get falsely flagged, then I'll just buy a nebula subscription (or whatever) and never use youtube again.
In fact I went over to nebula to check it out.
Somebody has to pay something for youtube to be viable. But youtube got big via offering a free service and now if feels like they're trying to pull up the ladder behind themselves.