> How else should Youtube make money from those users? They must literally lose money on those users.

For example, YouTube could increase the price of advertising on their platform to make up for the fact that a certain fraction of users never see the ads, thus keeping everyone who matters happy.

1. That kinda already happens to a degree. A significant part of the youtube audience is outside of US & Europe and so those users are worth less to advertisers because advertising budgets are somewhat proportional to the population's disposable income. However youtube still has the same cost whether they're serving a user who advertisers would pay a lot for or a user where advertisers won't pay a lot for.

2. That's just making the experience worse for the people who do watch ads. Imagine it's a restaurant and you're raising the price so half the people can eat for free (this way everybody stays happy).

Ad networks work on a bid system. If the impressions/clicks were worth more, bidding would be more competitive and prices would already be higher.

Why should advertisers pay more for ads that fewer people watch? Why would an advertiser be okay with sponsoring people that avoid their ads? It's not the advertisers' jobs.

Neither is it my job to buy the advertisers' product. Why should the advertiser have to pay for being shown to people who are so hostile to advertisements that they would block them if they could?

When I used to watch broadcast television I used to do the utmost to avoid the ads by muting during ad break. However, on the occasions that an ad would actively interfere with my watching experience, such as an animation on the channel logo, or a sudden ad break with an ad premeditatedly designed to catch you by surprise (often by "sponsors") I made an explicit decision to boycott said product if I had an opportunity. There are brands that I stopped buying because of these things.

Those people are more valuable:

People who react with antipathy to ads have been removed, increasing the value of the brand messaging by negating brand damage in large-scale ad campaigns.

Because there is no alternative to youtube for putting ads in front of the entire internets video hosting service. Google, meta, twitter, all have such massive captive audiences: their advertisers. Why not squeeze money from their actual customers that have so much of it compared to dubiously effective penny scraping from users? Are the major shareholders of these companies overleveraged in the advertising firms or something?

Except Google, who would presumably lose advertisers by increasing prices, and the advertisers themselves who now have to pay more.

What are they going to do, advertise on vimeo instead? There is no alternative to something like youtube.

This makes no sense. The fact that users don't want to pay and don't want to watch ads is a pretty clear indication that YouTube is user hostile.

And why are you assuming that YouTube should make money at all? It is YouTube'job to find a business model that works without coercing users. If users don't want to pay (money or attention) then YouTube is not offering anything worth paying. And it's their fault, not the users'

> YouTube is not offering anything worth paying

That's for you to decide, and if you (and the other tens of people that think the same) end up leaving the platform that would reduce YouTube's costs, which makes sense for them.

Your argument is basically the same people use for piracy. If you don't want to pay for Photoshop, don't use it. If you don't want to pay for YouTube, don't.

This doesn't work for Photoshop. As using pirated Photoshop doesn't change anything for adobe, but using YouTube without ads costs google money.

I'm confused at this argument, you're saying that since it's easy to steal the content we should assume it's youtube's fault for trying to charge for it?

I imagine most things that people pay money for they'd prefer to get for free, but that's not an actual option on the table.

YouTube provides a service you can either pay for with money or attention, and sure if people don't think it's a worth while expenditure of either then by all means they shouldn't watch it.

Why are you assuming YouTube should provide their service for no compensation?

They aren't coercing anyone. They're offering a service with a service agreement. It's as much coercion as my ISP saying they won't give me internet access if I don't pay.

Both outcomes of "pay and we'll give you access" and "I won't pay and I won't get access" are reasonable outcomes in a free society.

Paying for services doesn't prevent advertising companies from continuing to insert ads. Consumers would be stupid to trust that game as you advise.

No trust is required. You can simply just stop using the service then. Or now. There's no real stickiness since it's not essential to have Youtube.

I did consider paying. But I also want to do quite a bit of YouTube in private browser tabs. their age gate already makes that quite annoying. I certainly won't pay and still get such blocks...

Then that's nothing against YouTube, you've basically ruled out paying for any service on the internet because you refuse to stay logged in and apparently can't be bothered to log in each time you open a private tab.

Not really sure how you expect content creators to be paid at all for what they produce, then.

Youtube really was something else before content creators. It would be interesting if we still had such services. You know, people just uploading things because its genuinely funny or interesting, not because they want to scrape pennies off of it.

> Not really sure how you expect content creators to be paid at all for what they produce, then.

What makes you think I watch content creators who are into this for the money?

As if subscribing would stop google from tracking me? I use an adblocker mainly for privacy, and YouTube premium doesn't solve that.

Neither does your ad blocker. If you don’t want to give Google tracking data - a very valid position - don’t use their services at all. They don’t need to sell an ad to track what you watch, from where, or what devices you use.

Nope thats not true, Adblockers stop a lot of ad tracking, blocking tracking pixels, scripts, telemetry and so on.

Sure - on third party sites where Google can’t see the traffic. Do you really think YouTube refuses to share that data internally with Google’s core business?

They steal your data without telling you (complex legal verbiage on multi-pay TOS's is not a justification). After they steal your data, they push you advertisements that are devoid of morality. Even if I buy their service, I cannot go to their home page without them pushing violence, animal abuse, drug use, provocative sex, biased politics, etc. Even if I buy their service, I must expect they are funneling my data in terrible ways. Even if I follow all the rules, the service continues to abuse me.

Good thing that you don't have to use their service then !

Good thing that there’s a plethora of different services that weren’t killed by YouTube’s anticompetitive practices over decades.

It's not really a problem to lose money on some users if they are making money over all. And they are, because Youtube is very profitable and drives billions of dollars in ad revenue a year. They never really cared about every user being a profit generator for them. Except, last quarter, they missed their ad revenue growth expectations—as did much every big company around—and they are freaking out. That's what this is. It's not a question of whether Youtube can afford to keep the lights on, it's that Alphabet wants them to be continually _growing_, and this seems like a way to do that. I think Netflix empowered them to do this by cracking down on shared passwords, which was successful for them (at least in the short term).

> It's not really a problem to lose money on some users if they are making money over all.

Both sides of this argument are laden with assumptions. It’s a more opinion-based discussion than most. It’s a philosophical wormhole with no clear answer.

(Not saying I agree with this.) It’s a perfectly reasonable conclusion that using an ad blocker is morally wrong.

This philosophy stack exchange does a good job of breaking down the argument in the context of music: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/1597/is-it-im...

I’m sure both content creaters and google tout their views still from all of these supposed “freeloaders” who are showing advertisers and shareholders that there is engagement with the site. If google wants to put their money where their mouth is, an adless view wouldn’t actually register as a true view.

Oh no! Maybe reaching monopolist position by anticompetitive means wasn’t such a great idea after all?

> How else should Youtube make money from those users? They must literally lose money on those users.

Cry me a river.