Get real. Fuck ads. Nobody should ever have to deal with them.
1. deal with ads,
2. pay to support the service without ads,
3. use adblocking and be a free rider off people doing #1, or
4. expect web services to be given to you as an act of charity
You and I are both doing #3, but let's not pretend it's some act of noble civil disobedience. It is good for us that others are subjected to ads, as it allows us to get useful services for free without having to be.
It is bad that anyone is ever subjected to ads.
We're talking about this right now on a web service given to us as an act of charity (modulo the occasional sponsored job listing), and I'd like more of the web to be like that. Refusing to participate in the ad revenue model makes sites like this more likely to arise.
I think your modulo is missing some aspects. How many VCs are as famous as YC among tech workers? How many of them have as much credibility in the tech scene as YC? How much of that comes from this site?
I don't know how much it costs to run it, but I assume it's peanuts compared with what YC gets out of it. I wouldn't confuse altruistic charity (e.g. donating anonymously to a cause you don't personally benefit from) with what boils down to sponsorship and getting the goodwill that comes with it.
Which is also now they are abusing their market position built by cutting all other companies that could do the same but simply could not get past dumping price of free by VC fueled "startups". Which I believe some government org should look into.
Second of all they benefit by externalizing all negative effects of their platforms where they don't handle moderation of offensive comments towards creators which causes lots of psychological damage. There is whole load of evidence they even set it up in ways to specifically get people dependent on dopamine from watching just one more video.
Lastly - cable TV in US was paid with no ads and when they found out they can earn more money they still put in ads.
For me it is noble act of civil disobedience.
So you're addicted and can't stop now?
Plenty of people are perfectly content with the model of free ad-supported services. Who are you to step between them and those services and say no?
What else do you want?
You want it to be free for you where you don't have to pay anything to use it? Seems like you don't have a realistic view of what it costs to run / build / maintain this.
I love "the confidence" as I think that is what makes a great entrepreneur who says something like "Oh that is easy, I can do that", cut to 10 years later and a lot of pain, and maybe they have...
My day to day "job" is something for the public good and I do it without getting paid for it. But it still has to make money to survive even with that.
When we’re talking about consistently serving video at the scale they are, those costs won’t be minute.
Obviously they’re looking to turn a profit (if not profiting already), but I don’t think the situation changes dramatically either way.
ads represent (to me) psychological coercion, exploitative capitalism, fear-mongering, and generally the worst cultural and psychological trends packed into dense snippets of trash.
very few of the things I actually use and adore were ever advertised to me in any way other than by trusted word-of-mouth, and the results of that are staggeringly better-fit than anything i've ever encountered on the web.
and that isn't even talking over the ads shown for wars and efforts I don't support, ads that are vehicles for malware, or ads that are vehicles for either propaganda from a state agency or somewhat radical organizations.
Most videos on YT are simply not worth my trading of values for the exposure to the trash. The transition from "creator place" to "media moat" isn't something I appreciate nor am I willing to participate in.
simply put : Ad-blockers simply enable me to stay in a better place mentally. The moment they started getting iffy on YT I tried to disable them and got a bunch of war-gore imagery thrown in my face from some NGO relief group begging for money in the midst of a hobby machinery video, these types of ads and abusive imagery are simply inappropriate, and I won't let the media be held hostage against me for the sake of collecting a toll or else being exposed to it : I just won't participate on that side of the net.
I see this as a nice "balance" that reminds them (if enough people don't cave in) that their monopoly is not giving them a free rein to do anything they want.
Which, FWIW, they got there by being the only player. It's interesting that no one else has really tried until TikTok
Personally, I pay for YT premium since it's a slightly better way to support creators (that I don't directly pay via Patreon) and I get Youtube Music. If they raised their prices unreasonably, I'd just enable my youtube-dl script on my plex server and watch for free there.
I also watch a lot of Youtube, outside of a couple of good movies and TV shows that I stream from my plex. So YT premium makes a lot of sense for me
Also - just because it doesn't have the content that you, personally, watch, does not make it not a competitor.
Let's read your list and consider which of those options hosts long form video content
Reddit: a link aggregator, not a video hosting site Tiktok: Chinese data collection machine that hosts very short form videos Instagram: data collection machine that hosts pictures your mom likes and short form videos Twitch: focused on streaming and gaming, not a YouTube competitor
Reddit has supported direct video uploads for literal years, maybe 5 years at this point, and up to 15 minutes in length. TikTok also collecting your data doesn't change that it hosts videos, and supports up to 10 minutes, and that limit has been increasing as they try to be a more general purpose video platform. Instagram hosts pictures, but also livestreams and videos, both short-form (a few minutes), and long-form (IGTV supports to an hour). Twitch is the only one that seems to clearly not support long-form video content, but even then it's still a competitor because that's not all Youtube does either.
If more people get their video entertainment from TikTok, then they watch YouTube less.
Most blatantly, YouTube literally launched shorts recently - an exact TikTok competitor clone.
Also, I do not want to risk accidentally sharing exact videos I watch, while logged in.
Also, I anyway need to download videos as browser player lags while VLC does not.
In my country yt premium costs almost like Spotify premium and for me it doesn't bring enough value in comparison
/same
+1, I thought you were talking about me :)
Also available on mobile.
Works great with Premium.
I do this to keep my recommendations clean.
The average compensation for a software engineer, in the realively wealthy country of Italy, is like 40k annually. 140 bucks per year just to remove ads is obscene
You can get a netflix subscription for that money (which invests billions into content) or like 5 digital newspaper subscriptions (who do investigative journalism)
An ad blocker can be created and then forgotten about.
Maybe they can do something with their trillions of dollars, or since we're already paying for youtube with our data, maybe they can do something with that and all the other highly personal and intimate details of our lives they've collected primarily without our consent (and at times through violations of the law). Seems like they ought to have some kind of way to make money with that... Maybe they can let people pay them to get to the top of search results or something. Maybe they could sell locked down data collecting laptops or do something with cell phones? They seem pretty smart, I'm sure they'll figure it out.
They should stop doing evil shit, then I'd happily pay.
It's coercion because they're a monopoly due to their anticompetitive practices. It's like killing your parents and then asking the judge to give you a break, because you're an orphan.
From my point of view it’s more than worth the cost.
This affects publishers both large and small, from Youtube to mommy bloggers. Like all those recipe blogs filled with bloat so they can stuff more ads. And the passive aggressive popup complaints about asking me to disable my adblocker: absolutely not. Sorry dude, but the value of what you're offering is worth "free" to me, and you can prove this to yourself by switching to a subscription payment model for whatever you're publishing. You'll make almost nothing compared to what you make from ad revenue because what you're offering just isn't as valuable as you think it is.
Don't reward companies for creating artificial problems just so that they can bill you for getting out of your way. Save your money for companies that offer solutions to problems they didn't invent.
Or they can drop the adtech business or spin it out as a separate company. But either way currently there is no way to fairly deal with ad tech companies with thinly veneered “free” services on top.
Your individual data is worthless. Data is only worth something in aggregate.
Spoiler: $0. Your data is not worth anything.
1. Your kidneys, or heart, or any vital organ.
2. Weapons grade Plutonium.
3. Falcon heavy.
4. A single grain of rice, 100 million times.
What you are saying implies “we don’t have a good marketplace for user data”, which is pretty obvious. But I have no idea how “thus it is worth nothing” follows from there.
A business model based on taking away basic web browser functionality like being able to play videos in the background and removing unwanted content then selling it back to the user is a toxic business model. Anybody who pays for a blatant scam like Youtube "Premium" is part of the problem.
You can like the content while hating the delivery mechanism and trying to fix it up to the best of your ability.
In reality, I once had monetized videos until one day they changed the rules to “number of subscribers” and none of my videos mentioned “subscribe” so I didn’t have enough. Oh well.
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. Most people will never see a dime of the money made from their videos. One-hit-wonders on YouTube are now pointless.
Free storage of data uploaded by willing users = hosting the data hostage?
This is untrue. As there was significantly less users on Youtube early on, it's highly likely that most of their total content consists of recently uploaded videos. This becomes more and more true as time goes on.
On what basis?
I'd go to a competitor, but there isn't one, due to YouTube's VC-funding-fuelled anticompetitive practices. I literally wish that private service funding never existed; I don't owe YouTube here.
If they don't earn money then they'll go bankrupt and open up room for someone else, which is an outcome I'm perfectly happy with.
My only concern is preserving videos between when YouTube goes down and a competitor comes up, because a lot of them are liable to disappear.
In fact, a lot of Youtube videos disappear anyway, so we ought to back them up regardless.
I'm not signing up to their enshitification pathway.
Great work extension author, I look forward to checking this out.
Anything else is just fooling yourself into believing that other people will work for free making the things you like and the endgame for that is unskippable ads and more content only available to subscribers behind DRM.
There is this thing called mécénat in French that translates to patronage or sponsorship. Which means that whoever has the money and wants to see the thing created, pays. And everybody can enjoy it.
And this doesn't need to be a single rich person. In modern times communitites can fund millions for projects they want to see created.
And YouTube doesn't create anything at the moment except wonderfully popular YouTube Rewind videos.
A web browser is a client application and I get to choose how it renders the content the server sends to me.
Businesses will pay for those percentage changes because in aggregate a lot of people will see the ads. This changes when they know the odds are zero and that’s why YouTube is doing this.
So, I don’t watch YouTube on my phone any more. I will do whatever it takes to never, ever get ear raped by those commercials, ever again.
And no, even if they go so far to put it in the stream itself, I will hook it up as an input to MythTV and have it remove the commercials for me, just like it does on regular tv. I’ll never see them, I don’t consent to seeing them, and if you disagree, I’ll happily buy some ad space so you can stare at my shiny ass for 30s every 6 minutes.
I’m not stealing entertainment. They can block my browser’s request or require authentication and payment. They’re free to stop me videos upon request at any time.
My browser requests a video. They send the video and some other stuff. I chose to discard the other stuff they sent. They could just not send me the video if I haven’t paid.
I don’t regret the couple of evenings I spent installing Yattee and Piped on my own server. Now I need not worry about YouTube.
Over 10 years I’ll have saved enough to get a MacBook Pro
About two years ago, pre-adblocking crackdown, I was having a great time with YouTube and I considered buying the premium subscription because I really liked the product.
Then the number of ads and their frequency changed massively, ruining the whole experience for me, the premium subscription went from feeling like "something I want because of perceived value" to "something I now need because YouTube has been made unusable in an attempt to coerce me into paying".
I went from checking out the prices and planning the purchase to blocking the whole domain on my pihole for all devices except my workstation.
I was also very disappointed by the subscription model: no yearly plan, no way to bundle it with the Google One subscription that I already pay for, the price of a family plan Vs individual subscription is predatory and anti-consumer (325% higher per individual).
I am happy to steal the content and I shall do that with yt-dlp and VLC because it is the best user experience for actually watching videos. The browser is not anyway.
Right.
Great. Good for them. What about the rest of the world, some (many) of whom can't afford a(nother) monthly subscription fee?
Are they now to be excluded from participating in popular culture, if they do not wish to be subjected to obnoxious advertising?
Youtube basically reached a de-facto status of a public library, considering it contains archival TV shows, sports matches, original music, documentaries, lessons, instructions, clips of contemporary life, and so on. While median quality is much lower, it easily rivals Wikipedia in breadth and depth.
It my opinion, it should be publicly funded, without discriminating access based on willingness (ability!) to pay or to be subjected to ads.
My sole argument is that a lot of people in tech are better off just paying for Premium because their time is worth more than using a cheat or watching/dealing with ads.
And for those who think it's not worth it, that's totally fine. I'm not arguing that you should pay or even use YouTube.
My only point is that devs should think carefully about the value of their time.
I don't think even Google consider it as a real option internally, it's just a way to get more money out of higher income users.
The pricing of the premium subscription is absolutely insane, they get peanuts from each users from the ads compared to that.
I still think if you are a high value target for advertisers, it’s a probably a worse deal for YouTube if you’re on premium.
It’s also a little bit moot because YouTube creators often in-line their own ads so they can’t be skipped…
Copyright effectively gives YT an arguably illegitimate monopoly status on a lot of content which hasn't been uploaded elsewhere. Compared to, say, "modern" Usenet where files are distributed and users choose their provider.
Ads are trash and I'm somewhat willing to pay, but not on the Google terms that takes away my privacy and right to run FOSS.
YouTube server's not running on your computer.
The client is, my browser is, and the ads that I suppose they want me to watch would be displayed through my computer.
But if that's the choice you prefer to make, then the objectively more ethical thing to do is to not watch the video content either.
For some reason people have misconstrued ones responsibilities towards ones neighbors with ones responsibilities towards multi-billion dollar companies.
copying isn't theft, convincing people it is theft is tantamount to the scam that caused people to believe diamond rings were a part of marriage proposals.
It's no more unethical to refuse to play specific content on a device you own than it is to refuse to purchase a diamond ring when proposing marriage.
That's a strained analogy at best. Let's just go back a few decades: is it unethical to mute your TV and go to the bathroom in 1980 when a commercial comes on? Of course not. So is it unethical to not watch an ad on YouTube? Of course not. Using an ad-blocker to make the experience more seamless therefore isn't unethical either.
If YouTube wants us to watch ads without being able to skip them, then they need to shut down their web service, and make special closed-source player apps that allow them to fully control the viewing experience. Good luck with that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engagement_ring
> In the early 21st century, the jewellery industry started marketing engagement rings for men under the name "mangagement rings".
...
> The idea that a man should spend a significant fraction of his annual income for an engagement ring originated from De Beers marketing materials in the mid-20th century in an effort to increase the sale of diamonds. In the 1930s, they suggested that a man should spend the equivalent of one month's income in the engagement ring.[40] In the 1980s, they suggested that he should spend two months' income on it
---
it's a marketing swindle, not an analogy.
Blocking ads has nothing to do with people thinking you're cheap, and certainly nothing to do with commitment to a relationship, or your prospective spouse's opinion of you. It's only about whether you're somehow morally obligated to pay attention to advertising that comes along with something free. There's nothing at all free about diamond engagement rings.
Blocking ads is about as unethical as shielding your eyes from the sun.
In reality, however, this is just a dumb justification for unethical behavior, because people with adblockers will just look for ways to circumvent their anti-adblock measures, in order to keep consuming content for free.
And this behavior is akin to piracy. Software piracy which ensured monopolies thrived.
Just as in the 90s, when software piracy helped companies like Microsoft or Adobe to own the market, YouTube is now a monopoly thanks to people like you. Because alternatives, like Vimeo, couldn't differentiate by being ads-free.
And now that monopoly, which adblockers helped create, is used as further justification for the existence of adblockers. Funny how that works out.
I wouldn't care, except the writing is on the wall for where this is going. In truth, adblocking still works simply because publishers like Google still allow it to work, by not investing in anti-adblock tech or lobbying for legislation (e.g., DRM). It's either that or paywalls everywhere. And this will hurt the open web, much like how software piracy hurt general purpose computing.
Enjoy the free experience while it lasts.
but shush, we don't talk about the pirated ... err blood diamonds involved, ethics only becomes important when it's the public doing something they don't like.
The person replying to you probably wouldn't work for free or "exposure," would they?
It’s easy to host video now so I’d also note that not treating YouTube as a fundamental human right would also open up room for competition. If they’re so bad you can’t stomach paying for what you like, why are you spending your time helping them maintain their high market share?
1) no money + they get data
2) money + they get no data
3) no money + no data (me ;)
Choose one. Non-negotiable. Seriously. Gatekeep or pretend like you have any jurisdiction or power all you like while I sidle by on option 3)
Exactly!
Now, how do you think these millions of content creators get paid for their content? And why do you think they willingly upload the content to <insert here your streaming platform of choice -- YouTube, Twitch, Nebula, etc>?
Putting YouTube aside -- in the end of the day there's three options for content monetization:
1) we all pay for content
2) somebody else pays for it (like advertisers), in exchange for something they need (e.g. visibility, sell you products)
3) you freeload folks in #1 and #2 for as long as you get away with, until you become the majority, and things start crumbling apart.
People will continue to make and share videos regardless of whether they get paid for it. There are countless channels that have less than 1k subscribers (Google's threshold to pay you anything at all), that upload semi-regularly and often have interesting content. (I subscribe to those via RSS, just to make sure I don't miss an upload.) People made content long before YouTube was able to pay anyone anything at all.
People make their videos even though YouTube basically guarantees them nothing in terms of promoting/driving traffic (btw even if you have a million subscribers, you have to continue to game the algorithm, please remember to upvote this comment!). Even after that, your payout is a cut of Google's ad/premium income, not "pay per view".
Finally, people make sponsored content, set up tip jars, sell merch, etc because ads alone can't fully support a high-effort channel.
More importantly, YouTube has been generating losses for a heck of a long time (including after being acquired), which again - considering that it is a de facto public service, makes me think that it should've been publicly funded. (By whom? Excellent question. Maybe tax some of those billionaires who poured VC money to kickstart it.)
If YouTube wants to put a paywall up then fine, but until then I’m going to keep using my user agent which includes an ad blocker. I didn’t turn the adblocker on specifically for YouTube and I’m not going to turn it off for YouTube.
Correct! It happened by offering a completely free service with no advertising, in order to become the dominant player and eliminate all the competition, some of which was trying to use more sustainable business models. The idea that YouTube should be free also didn’t happen magically, it was (and still is) intentionally fostered.
YouTube is free. If you don’t mind ads.
Lots of competitors have tried to use both paid accounts and ad-funding. What competitor I might prefer is irrelevant here, but there are plenty of them, just Google YouTube competitors. Vimeo is a good example of a site with high quality content and a more sustainable business model that tried for a while and was unable to broach the same market. YouTube so far surpassed everyone by offering videos without ads until more recently, in order to gain market share. The mindset you’re currently arguing against was established and curated and encouraged by YouTube, and they’re still hoping you hang on to it while they keep cranking up the amount of advertising and trying to normalize the bogus idea that avoiding ads is somehow bad. They do not have to offer an ad-funded business model, so if they don’t like the cat-and-mouse adblocker game, they can switch to paid accounts only.
It’s perfectly fine to block ads, because it’s perfectly fine to ignore ads we didn’t ask for. You can fast-forward or turn the volume down manually, just like you can write software to automate it. As a society, we wouldn’t have it any other way. We’ve had this same debate over VHS and DVD warnings & trailers, over TV and cable ads, over radio ads, and over general internet website ads. It will never change because advertisers are not allowed to force us to watch ads, as much as they’d like to.
In any case, if they make the choice to live off advertising, it’s their problem. They are not owed a business model.
YouTube has the right to offer only paying accounts, and stop serving free videos. They are choosing not to exercise that option. In fact, they chose to monopolize video streaming by initially offering free videos with no ads. Demanding ad viewing time is a recent change to their business model.
Consumers also have the right to not watch YouTube, but when YouTube chooses to serve “free” ads that are annoying and waste time, as long as there are easy technical options for removing them, the temptation is pretty high. There is no law that you must watch ads, not on YouTube, not on TV, not for billboards, not on the internet. And basically nobody wants to waste time watching ads. This is why it’s wrong to call it “scamming”.
BTW I’m perfectly fine with the idea of an ad-funded business model for free services. I’m only objecting to your framing that avoiding ads when they can puts consumers in the wrong. YouTube’s funding is YouTube’s business, and they are free to fight against ad-blockers, but please don’t be a shill or vilify people for doing the obvious and legal thing. YouTube wants you to spout this crap because Google and advertisers would love it if there was public support for making ad-watching legally mandatory, and that would be a nightmare dystopian future we don’t want.
Do you want to work for free?
If I "[worked] for free", I'd be giving away hours of my time.
When Google "[gives me] content for free", they're losing fractions of fractions of a cent in bandwidth.
This is a shitty equivalence.
What about the first language you acquired? I hope you pay a per use perpetual fee for every sentence popping in your mind in its expression space, and that your license to use it also includes an obligation of permanent report of every single bit of intimacy that you might experiment.
I think they should pay their fair share and not expect us to give them stuff for free
That's the middle-class concern of children who have never known what it's like to go hungry.
Of all the things to push for being publicly funded, this aint it. How about daily medical and dental? How about insurance for vehicles so the poor don't get unduly punished?
I could go on and on, your perspective is just out of touch.
Even if you remove the ads, it's WORK to find quality content on YouTube these days, and this happens to a large degree because they incentivize their content providers to trick the algorithm and users into watching garbage for money. We saw the same happen with Twitter in real time when they announced revenue sharing.
YouTube is more broken today than it ever was. I don't know the exact recipe for fixing this, but this ain't it. I'm not paying to support this cesspool.
Nobody complained when YT was monopolizing online video because it was convenient and free and then they proceed to bait and switch us into paying.
Screw them, I won't pay out of principle.
If you no longer like either deal, stop reinforcing their market share: your usage tells creators they need to stay on YouTube.
Youtube Premium is the best subscription video service out there in my opinion. I'm very happy with it being the one thing I pay money for.
I could subscribe to a pay per view with monthly cap model.
For now I use it with ads, hate it, and use it less. Only for information gathering, certainly not for entertainment.
Continuing is never desirable so I always had to waste a click closing that so it wouldnt obscure part of the screen.
Now I dont mind ads but if they are annoying or too many, or worse: their new adblocking system was detecting me as adblocking despite me having it all off, or it not working on mobile whatsoever, you know the site is just flat out broken for me, well… I will just refuse to go on YouTube.
Creating a Google account, however, is a problem. Having to log in with that account is a problem. Having to link the account with a credit card or some other payment method is a problem. Having the account tied to my identity via a phone number, and/or the payment method, is a problem. Having the account used to track my viewing history is a problem. Having to possibly deal with a suspended/banned/compromised account, payment issues, and so on, is a problem.
Those are far too many problems to deal with, just to watch some videos.
If there was something more like dropping coins/bills in the hat of a street performer, I'd generally be willing to pay.
> If there was something more like dropping coins/bills in the hat of a street performer, I'd generally be willing to pay.
Some of the people producing on youtube have arrangements for this (kofi, patreon etc); there's also one built into youtube called "superchat", but of course that relies on being logged in and giving google your payment info.
I've never looked into Youtube Premium until this thread but it seems to be available for 10€ a month in my location. That's a reasonable amount of money I could certainly pay if I had the option of doing so privately. I don't want to have my viewing history associated with my account, I don't want to log into my Google account and have it remember my searches.
Give me a way to pay for the service without my subsequent use being tracked and data mined, and I'd be happy to pay.
FYI, I use adnauseum and don’t seem to get served ads on YouTube on my desktop where it is installed. I don’t choose to “block” ads on YouTube, so I guess they just aren’t serving them to adnauseum users.
But having the size of YT means it’s very hard to lose.
Personally, I wish platforms like peertube or bitchute would be much more know. But since YT is the place where everybody is watching it naturally follows that somebody new will post the video on YT first (and only) as well.
A huge amount of videos on YouTube are created for their own sake, with no expectation of going viral or making money off them. PeerTube fulfills the "free video host" role while also being ad-free. I might be naive, but I believe this is how most people saw YouTube around 2012.
The "seeking to make money on YouTube" role is artificially created as a result of a massive corporation running a loss-leader for a decade, dictating what content gets popular through recommendation algorithms, and literally paying people to encourage them to produce more of the desired addicting content.
Who knows what would have happened if YouTube had not been bought out and been allowed to compete fairly with P2P technologies as they emerged.
It's estimated that there are 1 billion YouTube videos, compared to 600k videos hosted by PeerTube. Thats a 4 order of magnitude difference. Saying that PeerTube can "fill this role" is an outrageous assumption about scaling.
I am not saying that PeerTube is better and that people should be using it. I am saying that it is worse, because of the way YouTube developed and made competition impossible.
Speaking of litigation, nobody's been sued for watching YouTube. People got sued for BitTorrent traffic all the time; up to and including dedicated settlement extortion operations (e.g. Prenda Law). This is a third role of YouTube we don't really consider: they handle all the stupid copyright stuff so that users don't have to. P2P inherently shoves all the liability[0] onto the users because you dox yourself every time you use it. Imagine, say, someone suing individual P2P users to try and shut down, say, a SSSniperWolf[1] video.
If you took YouTube away today, you'd have creators moving to Nebula or Floatplane, because there's still money in that. There really isn't money in PeerTube. Monetization is the thing that really put YouTube on the map, not free distribution.
Though, to be clear, video distribution is still hilariously expensive. Google considers YouTube to be profitable and has done so for many years, but that is almost certainly because YouTube gets to use Google's favorable peering arrangements with last-mile ISPs. These same ISPs also did all sorts of questionable things to throttle or block BitTorrent traffic back in the day, I imagine they'd come up with new attacks on PeerTube traffic today. The underlying problem is that we don't have any common-carrier regulation on ISPs, so they price traffic based on "value" - i.e. how much they can double-bill the sender of the packets - rather than the cost of that traffic.
If you want a viable YouTube competitor, you want net neutrality regulation.
[0] Ok, before you cite a Ninth Circuit opinion arguing that mere downloading still has liability or something, I'm not saying that you CAN'T EVER be sued for watching YouTube, only that you'd have to sue Google first, and they have big pockets.
[1] Notorious "reaction streamer" that doesn't actually do any reacting in her videos made up of entirely other people's YouTube uploads. Recently infamous for tracking down JacksFilms' physical location and bragging about it on Instagram.
Don't conflate being unwilling to give Google money with being unwilling to give anyone money.
I want out - I want to switch to a competitor, I'll pay money to do so. But Google's anticompetitive practices have taken that option from me. They broke the system and then get mad when I refuse to work within that system; so what?
My two cents:
1. Decentralization. I run my own PeerTube instance, with a bunch of my videos and a few viewers per day, and it requires basically zero maintenance. A RPi4 with a decent SSD is more than enough to run it, and unless you get hundreds of views per minute a decent home broadband connection is also more than enough. If you get more traffic, you can always ask people to contribute - and most of the folks on decentralized networks usually are happy to contribute. Plus, being ActivityPub compatible, from a single Mastodon or PeerTube profile, or even any RSS/Atom reader, you can follow channels on any instance. We often underestimate how easy it has become to run your own stuff if you know how to run a Docker container, and how easy it is to use syndacation and open protocols to publish to one place and broadcast to everyone. For some reason, the "you need a big centralized platform with big servers that can autoscale, big financial backing and a big surveillance adware business model in order to serve some .mp4 files" dogma is hard to kill.
2. Creators-run platforms. I've been an early supporter of Nebula and I keep contributing to them. I get all the videos that my favourite educational creators post on YouTube, plus exclusive content, without ads and without YouTube's hostile practices, for ~$3/month, and I know that the platform is run by the creators themselves, so the money goes directly to them. The success of platforms like Nebula sends a clear message to YouTube: people are happier to pay a monthly subscription to a service that only offers a curated subset of what's available on YouTube, knowing that that money goes directly to the creators, rather than watching ads every 5 minutes on YouTube and getting all of Google's privacy-invasive and developer-hostile business practices.
This is a problem in countries where uploading copyrighted and illegal material has strong legal consequences (so I'd not want to share a video before I watched it fully so I can at least can see it doesn't have any obvious illegal content)
You can alleviate the problem by browsing some "borderline" profiles/instances with Tor/VPN though, or even just disable the "Help share videos being played" setting from the profile settings.
every silicon valley startup ever has this same plan of attack, and no one bats an eye. it's kind of like a long-term bait-and-switch. that's just how these things work, apparently. sadly.
Second, the entire reason they have those insane costs is because they got rid of the competition. Doing this at smaller scales is not nearly as expensive per user.
I recently had a site owned by the theme plug in. (They were using word press? What are they stupid? ) chrome edge and others had problems. Firefox/nightly with a hosts file and ublock origin? Nothing. I cannot remember the last time saw a youtube ad. Kudos for everyone that got this to work.
Anecdotally: I use YouTube very rarely. I follow a couple of channels that post new episodes now and then. And sometimes I need to study some DIY technique, or someone sends me a link to something they thought was funny or interesting; basically my use is random and mostly utility-driven, and certainly not fueled by me endlessly trawling YT for entertainment.
So for me, the ads are super annoying because they steal time away from me when I need to access some random video, and ad-to-video ratio is rather huge. But since I'm a light user, it will never make sense to pay for it. In fact, I often close down a video when I'm met with an ad, because it's just not important enough. For me, the ads kill the potential spontaneous joy that could be had from a short video.
Many people do pay for YT, and I don't really understand the attraction unless you're a parent with kids. But everyone is different.
They should introduce a lower tier with a usage limit. Say $5/mo for the first 50 videos being adfree.
And anyway, the videos themselves are ads and contain sponsored and affiliate content anyway, the tracking is intense, etc. you don’t get much value from your subscription
Yes, because like anything google, pretty soon the few dollars you pay per month to make ads go away will mean "pay to see fewer ads". Exactly like what happened to cable and subscription services.
We are ok with paying, but not:
- giving money to a user hostile company with a terrible moral track record
- giving money to keep being tracked anyway
- having to log in with a google account that can be locked a down any time, and will take over your entire android phone even from a single app
Ads are cancer.
If you can't find some other less toxic way to support your business then it should die.
FYI, I pay for plenty of other streaming services. I just don't feel YouTube is worth it. The content creators are worth it, YouTube itself is not.
Well, my anecdote: I'm a tech worker, but I make some multiples lower compensation than SV comp. I'm pretty frugal, but my household budget is still pretty tight. I can't pick up OT shifts at my job or easily transform my free time into money at a worthwhile hourly rate - and if I could, any additional money I'd make would be taxed at a relatively high marginal rate. To widen the gap between my income and expenses, it tends to be more time-effective to reduce my expenses by avoiding paying for services where I can do the work myself. Every dollar I save on expenses is a dollar that either a) goes into tax-advantaged retirement savings accounts, b) pays down my mortgage, or c) pays for self-investment, e.g. home insulation upgrades. (Once I run out of those options for my money, it will affect the marginal value of my time, but I'm some decades off still.)
Exactly what time are you referring to? It took me precisely zero time to remove ads on YouTube: I already have uBlock Origin installed, because ads on all the other websites are so unbearable, so I don't have to do anything at all to block ads on YouTube: it's already done for me.
By contrast, subscribing to YouTube Premium would require a fair bit of my time, in going to the website, figuring out where to click, going through the payment process page, digging out a credit card, etc. etc. Then I have to worry about managing yet another subscription, which will take time every month.
Is it really worth investing your time to subscribe to YTP when you can just block the ads by default by having a proper ad-blocker installed on your browser in the first place, which is a prerequisite for safe browsing in the modern age?