Demand your money back for such horrible service you are receiving…
This is like changing the TV channel during an ad break only to have them restart from the beginning once you switch back to it; wait, it's worse than that. Absolutely nuts.
How about a 30s ad before a 10s video?
Not disagreeing/agreeing with you but just want to point out that Alphabet Inc only publicizes Youtube's revenue and not the profit in their financial reports. So we as outsiders really can't say with 100% certainty whether Youtube is still losing money, or break-even, or profitable.
And if they are profitable this year (or recent years), does it make up for all the accumulated losses over multiple years since they acquired it in 2006? We don't have the raw internal numbers to calculate that.
The best number I could find is that over 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute. That’s 720,000 hours of video uploaded per day or 263 million hours per year.
At a modest estimate of around 1.5GB/hour for 1080p video (I think this is a very low estimate, since YouTube has much higher quality available now, and also stores different versions of each video), this works out to 376PB per year!
Other factors to consider:
* Transcoding. YouTube servers are constantly transcoding video into many different formats, given a single input file.
* Serving. YouTube isn’t served from one central data centre. They operate a huge CDN in order to serve users at the edge of the network. This means some percentage of that 376PB figure must be duplicated many times across many different data centres.
And Alphabet's 2022 net income works out to $59 billion. Let's not pretend that YT is some struggling startup that could be bankrupted by cloud costs at any moment.
Back before the acquisition, YouTube was losing hundreds of millions of dollars. They were burning so much runway the company was essentially an all-in moonshot to get acquired by one of the big players (Google being the most likely buyer).
Since then, their costs have only grown and rather dramatically at that. They are far larger in terms of users and the videos far higher quality than they were back then.
So why do people continue expecting Google to subsidize YouTube and run it at a loss?
A nickel per minute / month if they want to get greedy about it.
I feel like the obvious starting point is to sort videos by whether they meet a view count threshold like 1000, and I would expect that to preserve internet history quite well.
I would love to see a breakdown of how many hours of video youtube is storing, sorted by how many digits the view count has.
The average ad on YouTube is scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of creativity, cinematography and appeal to people in general. I’m talking about the average ad with personalization off — the mobile game “mafia boss”, slightly pervy, and really weird shock value ads, or the get rich quick schemes, or even straight up crypto fraud. If some better advertisers are targeting you - consider yourself very lucky.
I do enjoy a good ad every now and then. Something creative and well executed. But that’s not what YouTube is serving. And you might hate all ads — it’s ok, everyone is different. Though I think some people would be ok with ads that are respectful of their time as I am one of them.
It depends. Podcast syndication services like PocketCast and Apple Podcasts now programmatically splice in ads into the audio files. You could be listening to some podcast from years ago and it would have ads for [present-day-thing]. Sometimes even in the middle of a sentence, because these dynamic ads can't event detect silent segments.
Last night, 1 minute of preroll ads in front of a 4 minute video..
In fact when I went back just to check the video length, I switched off ad block:
It wanted to play 2 ads, first one being 1:37 ...
I think I'll go back to the to blanket adblock and see if I can spread a little of the loose change I have among those channels I truely get some worth out of.
No, this is not the reason. People hate ads, generally.
Go ahead and block ads. I use a PiHole myself (but also subscribe to YouTube Premium, so..). But stop complaining when companies try to do something about it, or acting like there's some optimal amount of ads.
Just as it's your right to block ads, it's their right to block ad-blockers. This is the game, it's been played for 20+ years.
Why are you dismissing offhand the idea that there is an appropriate level of ads that users will feel is a fair trade for the content they're getting? You're just completely rejecting the idea that there's any middle ground at all. Why would it not be the case that some reasonable limits on ad volume, content, maliciousness, and total percent of time covered by ads, could restore some goodwill toward ads? People hate ads because ads are unbelievably fucking terribly awful. Ads are as awful as they could possibly be, and nobody seems to be making any effort to sit down and say "what if our ads weren't fucking awful tooth-pulling assaults on human reason and consciousness? What if we actually changed that?" Nobody is saying that, and people like you are simply dismissing the idea that it even matters.
Why are companies trying so hard to do something that their customers hate? We all know the answer, we know we aren't "the customer", it's this perversion of incentive that people are complaining and should complain about
Ah, ok. Just let YouTube know how many ads they are allowed to run and we can clear up this whole issue.
But that's not even the issue. For instance the entire Steam platform is built around advertising computer games to me that I might be interested in, and I have zero issue with that. I discovered lots of interesting games by following Steam's recommendations which I then bought and enjoyed.
I also accept "sponsor ads" that are directly integrated into YouTube content creator videos, absolutely nothing wrong with that.
What's entirely pointless is YouTube showing me some fancy lifestyle ad that's entirely unrelated to my "lifestyle" and also unrelated to the video that I actually wanted to watch instead.
Youtube rarely knows what ads to show me. I don't make enough money to visit Saudi Arabia or buy a luxury EV, and I don't have Crohn's Disease, but those are the ads I get shown. If the ads were relevant it might be a different story, and that's supposed to be the entire point of targeted/personalized ads, but it routinely fails to deliver.
But you don't just buy more videos on YouTube. The videos are mostly free. So they have to advertise other stuff at you.
In case of YouTube it should be guiding me towards interesting content creator videos about things I might buy (like video games I'm interested in). YouTube just needs to find a way to get a chunk of my purchase money from Valve if I end up buying a game on Steam after watching a Let's Play video for that game on YouTube.
But that's something for YouTube to figure out, not me ;)
I did. I installed a blocker once they added unskippable adds and I was fed up with 2 ads in a row before a 10 minutes video. They did not seem to get the message as every time I try to disable the blocker it seems to be getting worse.
The product is worth 0 ads.
I really doubt the acceptable number of ads on a really well-crafted video player and search engine sitting on top of a nearly infinite amount of content is zero.
Google essentially holds creators hostage in this arrangement. Creators provide content the consumers want, but they only get paid well if the consumers don't skip the ads. So creators have to pander to what Youtube as a platform "seems to want" (thumbnails with :O face are so hot right now) in hopes that the algorithm will deliver videos to consumers who want them AND they are shown ads they don't immediately hate and skip. If any of those things fails to happen, they don't get paid as much as they should and it's not even their fault.
zero.
People say dumb stuff like "I whitelist my favorite sites and would be happy to watch a few short ads"
But the fact of that matter is that virtually no-one in the ad blocking crowd actually does this.
I suspect that is the same for the vast majority of people. Just like with music back in the day: people accept a minor nuisance (either ads or a small monetary cost) if they feel they get a good deal (a smooth experience and reliable content).
So if we can let broadcast TV know, why not YouTube?
You seemed to be mocking the entire idea of "too many ads". I think this kind of law is a pretty strong argument that it's a reasonable idea and not mock-worthy. But you don't seem to think that argument matters, so please, explain yourself more.
I supply a counter example, where a nation has collectively decided on a reasonable amount of ads.
And now you're handwaving that away?
Your two comments don't seem to be consistent with one another.
What we see today can only be described as greed.
How do we as a society decide whether these profits are "deserved"?
I absolutely love the YouTube ads discourse.
Sure, you will support all of the creators independently, but you're too cheap to pay for no ads for a great product (which shares fees with creators and provides them with tools, by the way, plus other features) to "stick it to the corporations". Meanwhile, you likely subscribe to at least one of Netflix, Spotify, Apple Music etc.
This is the perfect example of "if you like the product, pay for it." There's a ton of value YouTube Premium, both on the creator and consumer sides.
Youtube has allowed its algorithm to prioritize recommending radicalizing conservative content to people that have watched nothing but videos that have to do with videogames. That's not a model I want to support. That also makes me less willing to shell out.
I also (irrationally) still hold a grudge from when they took away the ability to play videos on the youtube app in the background in order to promote premium, which added back the functionality. This makes me less willing to shell out.
Content creators have for years been talking about how easy it is to get demonetized, how the payments get lower, how it's harder and harder to sustain a channel, how without clickbait and icon bait it's harder to get videos noticed, etc etc. This makes me incredibly unwilling to shell out.
So, to sum it up: If YouTube does a better job of policing their ad-content and makes them less overtly obnoxious, takes any steps at all to moderate the gaming-content to alt-right content pipeline, and restores their app's ability to play in the background without the premium version, and, probably most importantly of all, starts treating smaller content creators better and improving discovery of high quality, creative videos (over lowest-common-denominator clickbait bs) I'll consider paying them a monthly fee.
It’s not a great product. The player is absolutely terrible and goes out of its way to remove features that the OS player provides. The company is just another rent-seeking monopolist. It’s a product that I have to use, because it’s basically the only game in town after their bait and switch, having driven all competition to the ground when YouTube was free. I am glad to pay for Nebula and a couple of Patreons, but I cannot support Google willingly in this case.
They are not trying to win me over. They are trying to bully me into accepting the new deal they are forcing on us. I won’t comply.
> There's a ton of value YouTube Premium, both on the creator and consumer sides.
I’d be happy to if they were not trying to force their rubbish YouTube music thing as well. Again, they are not acting in good faith. Again, I do support Nebula, I am not against the concept of paying for videos itself.
So presumably none of this affects you because you don't use it?
What this means, however, is that I do what I can to de-enshitify what can be (and the less ethical the company, the fewer qualms I have about doing this, meaning I have zero issues with blocking Google and Meta trackers and analytics, and I have no respect for companies who don’t respect me and try to shove ads down my throat), and I jump ship the second there is an alternative.
The end of this cycle is DRM and ads becoming part of the content. YouTube can do that because your refusal to stop using their service only cements their market share.
Ad blocker users pay 0%.
My point is simply that continuing to use YouTube helps maintain their market share. If you don’t like them, you have to stop helping them.
What I hate when I'm watching YouTube on a device without an adblocker is that they show ads in the middle of a video. Thats a bad user experience IMO.
I could be more passive in my stance if they simply had all the ads in the beginning and showed some at the end before transitioning to another video or something, but I do not enjoy having my time interrupted during the video, that is the most annoying thing ever
I've had this happen during fitness videos, which is quite ridiculous indeed. If they'd at least slot them into a break between exercises...
I love it when I'm winding down from work, in the middle of nice chilled out relaxing music, and suddenly some roided-up asshole comes in at 10X volume SHOUTING at me "You want to get ripped in the gym?!?! Follow my workout method and crush it!!!!"
Thank you, YouTube, for destroying the entire last 20 minutes of relaxation I just enjoyed.
"We now return to your regularly-scheduled commercial."
"Oh good, I didn't miss a moment of this week's episode of Product Unboxing."
"This week's episode of Product Unboxing features the limited edition Thneed Premium but first I gotta give a shout out to my sponsor..."
However, we should also note that ads have gotten worse, more insidious, and personalized with tracking and that's rather creepy.
It's wild to see a lot of parenting in contrast. Kids come home from school, instantly sit down on phone or tablet, will complain incessantly or throw a tantrum if it's taken away for any amount of time, and eat whatever they want whenever they want and also tantrum if they can't. Usually involves a lot of yelling by parent with zero effect on child.
I've explained the purpose of ads and how nefarious they can be and they now hate seeing ads. At all.
When they play a game on their phones, when an ad appears, they put the phone down and look away or do something else.
The fact that they are going above and beyond is what makes people angry. YouTube may be the property of Google but they got so successful due to all of society and most people have the intuitive sense that Google is taking more than their fair share from society now.
The problem is not technical, and as long as Google continues to make their profits soar beyond what they deserve, people will continue to use adblockers.