(Of course it's true you'll still see shill review videos, and video creators doing ad reads for shitty VPNs - but those ads don't come from google)
> What kind of argument it is?
Back in the 2000s, on tech forums whenever someone would say "ad blocking is theft, server costs have to be paid somehow" someone would respond "I'd pay to remove ads if they'd let me" - well, now's our chance to do exactly that.
I adblock everything myself - but I earn a mid-career adult's salary now, and I get more value from Youtube than I do from Netflix so I don't mind paying for it.
But you still have to sit through the sponsor segments, right? Which are getting increasingly egregious - I've seen 12 minute videos with almost 3 minutes of sponsor fluff in the middle.
(Although if YouTube Premium has a better recommendation algorithm, I'd definitely pay for that given the current one is garbage.)
If you don't like this, I suppose you can block the channels that do this and only watch amateur channels that aren't in it for the money. Or they make their money from Patreon or other sources.
They promised the same thing with cable TV when it was new.
For now.... Until they decide to increase the price of ad free premium and introduce a new tier at the original price that includes ads.
It's the same argument people made about how if you get free stuff you should expect ads and if you don't like things then pay for them. It turns out the things we paid for just started including ads as well.
Sure, but if that happens you cancel then. Not paying now because it might get worse in the future seems a bit backward.
Unfortunately the enshittification of the whole experience is almost guaranteed, I agree with you there. But for now Youtube Premium is very much worth it when watching a lot. I have watched >160 hours since January [0] and am super happy with it. I always use an ad blocker so my experience hasn't changed. But it feels like the right thing to do. Also because content creators get more money per view from premium users. And because I pay for the family plan I don't have to be subjected to overhearing ads played by my immediate family either.
[0] Youtube shows stats on the account page on how much the premium features were used since going premium.
You'll be paying, and _still_ be the product all around the web.
Youtube Premium looks pretty expensive in comparison. I agree £60 is more of a reasonable price.
I suspect/predict the ads on Youtube are going to get longer, and more numerous, and more will be unskippable, and therefore more annoying.
They're already extracting more than enough profit from all of us at this point it's just pure toxic greed
From advertisers. That stream is being cut down by ad-blockers.
> more than enough profit
You are extracting more than enough value from YouTube already. You can either sit through the ads or pay up. It's just pure toxic entitlement at this point.
"Alphabet revenue for the twelve months ending March 31, 2023 was $284.612B, a 5.28% increase year-over-year.
Alphabet annual revenue for 2022 was $282.836B, a 9.78% increase from 2021.
Alphabet annual revenue for 2021 was $257.637B, a 41.15% increase from 2020.
Alphabet annual revenue for 2020 was $182.527B, a 12.77% increase from 2019." "
By "cut down" do you mean "all time high"?
Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.
Let’s just face the reality: the jig is up. I just really really hope the paid experience is completely ad-free.
Note that the debate is now framed around the degree of advertising or the degree of tracking that comes with their paid subscription, and the entire conversation is about whether a service is reasonable in their fee and business practices.
The entire landscape of conversation has been profoundly shifted from whether we should even allow this kind of tracking in the first place to how and what degree of tracking are we allowing.
There is absolutely no reason a copyrighted entertainment system has to become streaming or come with truly VAST troves of data collection that gets sold en mass to every third party imaginable with no transparency. The technologies exist to do this in so many other ways.
Yet, that point is rarely discussed anymore — the entire debate has been quietly reframed to a question of degrees.
Now, to suggest that such a system isn’t necessary or even good elicits nothing but “it’s not a problem if you pay for an account,” and “it’s not like any other services are better about it.” The entire landscape has moved.
There is a notable shift from individual consumption through direct ownership and the general assumption of the rights of ownership to individual leasing with intensive surveillance by proxy for the exchange or consumption of what I can only refer to as “entertainment commodities.”
It’s rather insidious.
Remember Winston’s lesson: The large mass of common people do not find in themselves the need to think independently, to question or to investigate what they have been taught.
And then consider that the most powerful tool in the arsenal of power to influence humanity has convinced everyone that in order for them to be entertained they need to submit to constant surveillance and tracking in their living rooms and on their mobile devices everywhere they go. Social and streaming are the coin that is offered for this contract.
It’s very literally big brother. And the debate has been reduced to what you will pay for the privilege of watching the latest Game of Thrones episode or whatever.
It’s just becoming so conditioned that it’s becoming invisible to people.
You basically want to extract value from YouTube and content creators without offering anything in return.
If the terms of YouTube are unacceptable to you, simply stop using it. That's rather different from 1984.