I used to watch YT through the TV app until the ads became insanely outrageous (six unskippable ads for a 10 min video, including two ads one minute after the video has started). Then I just bought a mini pc and plugged it in the TV and everything was fine (except for HDR that for some reason doesn't work) and without ads.
Then a couple of weeks ago I opened the YT app on TV and it was actually a much better experience than before: skippable ads, no ads on some videos. As if they're trying to lure me to use it again.
I reset the TV app whenever the ads become unreasonable, and every time I do that, the skip ads button reverts back to the original style (skip all ads after 5 seconds).
But if I login to an account, or use an anonymous session for long enough, the skip ads button will switch to the progress ring style, with 60+ seconds of unskippable ads. When that happens, I reset the app again.
You can go the Nebula route and require users to pay (which means far fewer users) or require creators to pay (which means far fewer creators). You could also require creators to host the videos themselves, but that also requires money, expertise and causes downtime when a video goes viral.
There's also P2P, but far too many users are on mobile and behind NATs these days for that to make sense. Even if this wasn't the case, P2P is a privacy and legal nightmare, it's trivial for companies to track what IP addresses watch what videos, and seeding of copyright-infringing content usually has far worse legal consequences than merely watching.
The simple fact is that the ad ecosystem YouTube directs has produced lots of low effort "content" farming, enterprises focused on raw output at the expense of quality, truth, and frequently the intellectual property of others.
The argument that it's your machine and you choose what to run on it no longer holds when YouTube clearly no longer wants people with ad blockers as visitors.
So watch ads, pay up, or go somewhere else.
I always get downvoted for stating the obvious, but YouTube's monopoly was helped by adblockers, because alternatives, like Vimeo, couldn't differentiate themselves by being ads-free.
I suppose you were also fine with Unity's change of toś and pricing, but many others weren't. We sent a strong enough message to the company so that their CEO resigned and hit them hard in the wallet and now they know better. As should you.
What happened here is they cornered the market (a monopoly), and now are rising prices and making it impossible to use their product without giving them both your data AND money. The same thing can happen to your water, electricity and phone bills, if the governments didn't mandate anticompetitive practices in law. That is the same reason Verizon in the US is so expensive yet so bad in terms of value for money.
Stop pushing your 'accept it or move on' mentality on others. There is lot to be done here with collective action and government support, not every country is 'everybody on their own' and 'Big Corp rule' like the US. So stop it.
We don't want to go somewhere else unless we can help it, and are willing to fight for a better internet.
When a company is that big and that impactful (despite being a for-profit company), it is in interest to the general public that there are some checks and balances in place.
For me, the best scenarios is governments involve themselves as they involve themselves in other areas of business:
- telecommunications and utilities (Verizon)
- transport (Uber has different treaties/operating models in different countries)
- online marketplaces (Google)
Only through treating these behemoths as providers of "public goods/utilities" via our governments, can we have them not regressing to what any monopoly would naturally regress to: arrogant hands-twisting thugs, not afraid to exploit their users for every penny.
Keep in mind that governments already DO involve themselves in the business (mal)practices of these tech giants. For example, Tesla's new cybergarbage is unlikely to pass a scruitiny in the EU due to pedestrian safety/impact concerns. Google/Facebook/Instagram all have to respect the GDPR and its US cousin the CCPA, etc, etc. If it wasn't for measures like this, you'd not have "do-not-track" options in your browser, nor would you have adblockers in the Google play store...
I simply want MORE, quicker and better government involvement into anticompetitive practices that (mostly) US tech giants use.
- go to it's pre-aggressive-ablocking-removal state
- pay the content creators better
- moderate better so people like Andrew Tate, Alex Jones, etc don't get a platform
- Organized action in all Nordics vs Tesla, where Musk thought he can simply do whatever he wants to the workers and their wages and not negotiate with the unions: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/05/danish-union-j...
- FTC finally chasing telecoms for the insane prices of broadband in America https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/12/the-telecom-industry-is-...
As you can see, both organized worker action and government oversight work very well to curb greedy companies. So please, when you see people outraged and trying to organize, if you don't want to join, don't, but don't try to tell people to 'just accept it', because we won't. We are angry and have had it up to here with corporate greed.
Organized action and government regulation work!
I think if you are above 500k yearly income, the taxation rate should be something around 80-90% on every cent above that threshold.
If I was earning more, I would not mind sharing an ever increasing percentage of that in terms of taxes. I don't need 20 houses and 20 cars, and my own rocket, no individual person needs that. People like that should not be allowed to exist by the government.
No it isn't. It's a horrible method of funding media because as you correctly realized it ends up lowering the quality of that media. This isn't just a problem with YouTube's implementation, it is an inherent aspect of ad-based funding.
What other avenue is there to pay for stuff you consume ?
PeerTube distributes the load among many independent servers, which can be even run by individuals. So no, not every competitor will have the same problems.
Peertube technically has P2P, but these days with strict NAT or CGNAT being common good luck getting any kind of P2P connection going for the majority of people. Plus a lot of people on both home and mobile connections have very restrictive data caps.
Peertube relies on peer-to-peer data exchange, so the server loads are much lower than you imply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38533454
Nope. PeerTube and the like is an alternative.
If we take say, Vultr as an example for outgoing data costs, that's something like $100,000 of data for a single video.
Yes P2P will take some of that load off, but not that much with how restrictive NAT is these days.
I'm not really sure what you didn't understand about distributing the video and cost.
But if it can now, that would be the missing piece that I wasn't getting.
As a (very) small scale provider video was costing me about 0.25 cents / hour. It is certainly cheaper for a larger provider. Ad rates are not that low, the margins involved are huge.
For a premium server I would take a heavy user as a model, say 8hr/day, giving a cost of 60 cents per month. Assume processing fees and overheads are about 30%, and a user is willing to pay $10/m for a service. That still leaves $6.40 to be split between platform and content creator.
Yes, video is expensive compared to text. But in absolute terms the costs are not that expensive.
I think there's still plenty of room for innovation in the ad serving front. YouTube is far worse than it used to be. It currently has multiple ads in a 10 minute video many of which have one 5-10 second mandatory clip followed by a much longer clip that can be skipped after 5-10 seconds.
The "you have to have the remote in hand to prevent even more ads" is pretty user hostile.
To make matters worse, on Android TV/Roku, many ads require HDCP so it's pretty normal for the device to require a reboot when ads start playing if the HDCP negotiation fails.
Youtube Premium is pretty expensive for a casual user ($144/yr).
The cost of servers/bandwidth isn't lost on me and Google gets the best rates in the industry, nonetheless. They're sufficiently big they can stick cache devices all over the place directly inside ISP networks (I assume they don't pay power/bandwidth on these since ISPs end up saving money)
If it's SO expensive, and SO needs to be paid somehow by someone why do they waste so much time and money trying to push videos on me I've either A) Already watched, B) have blocked and said "Don't recommend this channel" or C) are not even related to my search query at all, yeah YouTube I'm aware Sniperwolf and MrBeast exist, No I don't want to watch them now or ever I'm searching for pasta recipes and I'm certain you have more than 4 you could show me before trying to get me to watch asinine sniperbeast content.
I stopped watching TV 20 years ago, I have been using ad blockers as soon as they were introduced. The habit of not having to sit and watch some commercials is the most entrenched one in me. Hard to reverse a 20y habit.
But the point is it's unlikely they want all non-premium users to go elsewhere, not even merely the non-premium ad-blocking users.
In fact, they don't even really want premium users if it means not still showing them ads somehow and still collecting data on them. They offer premium more or less begrudgingly because they sort of have to in order to excuse the user-hostile behavior everywhere else.
Like donating to Firefox. They donate to firefox only so that they can make chrome as terrible as they want, and point to the existense of firefox as the answer to any complaints. They don't actually want anyone to use firefox. But it's better to let a few escape than to have the bulk decide to make laws they don't want.
Ptemium is the same. They don't really want any premium users. Or rather, sure they'd happily collect a subscription from everyone AND still show ads and collect data.
Which is pretty much what they do actually. Premium doesn't actually remove all the bad elements of youtube. It just goes from pulling 8 of your fingernails out to only pulling 5 of your fingernails out.
Not at all. Non-paying viewers are worth less than zero.
> Or rather, sure they'd happily collect a subscription from everyone AND still show ads and collect data. > Which is pretty much what they do actually.
What are you talking about? There are no ads with premium.
These threads always have a bunch of this weird type of person who doesn't understand that ads from YouTube and ads that content creators put in their videos are different things. I can't tell if they're being intentionally obtuse, or just legitimately do not understand how financial transactions work. Maybe they're teenagers who haven't worked a job before?
I use a little user script that redirects me from YT shorts URLs to a normal video player URL. I found that it adds just enough friction to getting the next video that just scrolling shorts for an hour doesn't happen anymore.
Added bonus is that you can rewind a bit of video if you want to, instead of having to watch the entire video again.
The problem is the moat. The moat is money.
They will work around ad blockers and continue to pile on repetitive and banal adverts that have nothing to do with the user until they reach breaking point (where people flee and seek alternatives), and then they will relax their system to show marginally less bullshit.
The confusing part of this battle is the app users, who do not agree with the avalanche of adverts, don't want to pay to scroll shorts until their brains leak from their ears, and cannot kick the awful habit.