Really we need some body like the UK ASA to say "you're liable for all these frauds, Google".

Seems like the internet ad industry wants scale, but doesn't want to solve the problems of scale.

e.g. https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/person-s--unknown-a23-1198241...

Enforcement is very limited to "misleading ad must not appear again". Eventually they'll have to do something a bit toothier or we're going to have an all-scam internet.

If advertising providers were de jure and de facto liable for fraud, then that will raise the bar for competing advertising providers, as if Google wasn't enough of a monopoly.

Regulation almost universally benefits established players and stifles competition, which is why a lot of regulation is (secretly) backed by large companies. (Note that I'm not saying that regulation never hurts large companies, and regulation can hurt both large companies and small companies/society.)

Such a weird take.. without regulation we would still have child labor, slave labor, cancer causing shit in basically everything, no seatbelts, even worse corruption in politics and companies, .. list goes on ..

We don't have to be on the side of 100% regulation is good but I hope we can see that a lot of regulation is actually making the world we live in liveable.

Google wins as long as the viewers don't leave.

why do you consider this massively overpriced? 55% of it i believe goes to content creators and they make more from a subscription watch then an ad supported watch.

Because i struggle to imagine the ads i watch would amount to $15/m. So it feels like significant markup.

A flat rate seems either upcharging, or subsidizing. Neither feel good as a consumer.

I rather (and have) quit than pay them $15/m for a handful of ads. They started fighting a month back or w/e and i just stopped watching them for ~2 weeks. When i tried later, the "problem" was gone lol. Not sure what happened.

I'd much rather pay for a platform that gives money to creators more directly. I pay for a fair share of things on Patreon, for example.

edit: I should note, my assumptions on price are based on how little ad views net in value.

55% to creators 45% to platform to host and stream while also supporting a ton of creators who have little to no views.

Seems a better deal then Netflix ect with more ability to control where your dollar goes

I say that primarily because of experience. For example i subscribe to Spotify, and the revenue split there is atrocious and often a point of debate between platforms. Maybe YT is better, but it's not clear to me from the outside if that's true.

(yes, I know content providers can still embed their own promotions into their videos).

When I dropped cable I started subscribing to dozens of channels and now have a pretty solid subscription list.

Many creators I follow have dabbled in different forms of monetization, and I've preferred to stick with the ones that offer patterns or other methods of supporting them.

I don't think it's fair to criticize googles product offering for the content creators choices

No, it serves the content without adding more ads of its own.

> You can choose to subscribe to authors that do not place ads or sponsored content in their videos.

If not consuming the content I wanted is a solution, I can just solve all the problems by not using youtube. That's not really a solution.

Looks like Google benefits by allowing scammy ads...

For everything else, use SponsorBlock! (Crowdsourced auto-skip YouTube for annoying in-video adverts)

Youtube only got to where it is now by Google plowing billions of dollars from a different monopoly into it. Most of the other major "free" consumer tech products gained their market share by burning way more money than most competitors could afford.

I signed up for Kagi search recently (I'm not affiliated with them in any way, just a satisfied customer), and aside from searching reddit, I consider their results to be superior to Google's. One of their main signals for downranking is how heavily ad/tracker-laden a page is.

There are YouTube channels i watch, but it's just a fun distraction. If they went away I'm not sure I would care that much. The educational stuff is handy, but that is all out there in different forms on the web anyway.

I'd like to be wrong, but so far the ad model is the best business model for such content.

Au contraire, it's very likely that it's not a coincidence.

The internet is just a medium, and Facebook / YouTube are just mass platforms filled with people who click on these ads.

But YouTube specifically has built-in segmentation that allows to skip this whole cesspit, it is called YouTube Premium. Same way you would skip yellow papers at kiosk and spend money on better press twenty years ago. (afaik Facebook was recently forced to introduce similar [half-baked] subscription model due to local EU regulations.)

There's a reason why a lot of forums went downhill and got replaced by Reddit... moderating them is a constant effort (and Reddit at least takes over the legally mandated stuff like CSAM, piracy and basic anti-spam), admins are tired of skiddies exploiting phpBB or whatever vulnerabilities the very second they get public, you gotta deal with trolls DDoS'ing you for fun, and also users are lazy because they don't want Yet Another Login (not to mention, Reddit centralizes notifications vs a flooded mailbox). And for blogs, the situation is very similar.

Forums died all the time back then because the admin got tired of the mess. People these days would be far less tolerant of joining these small groups and pouring time into them, only to have them disappear a few months later.

So what now, a ban on "mass communication for everyone at scale"? How exactly will that be defined and enforced?

Ranging from fast fashion sites "going out of business" (whose domain was registered within the last 90 days) to kickstarter campaigns for cloned products to drop-shipped products with slick videos whose discount price is 3x what it costs for the same on Amazon...

Most of us could be more profitable if we decided to act unethically or illegally. Serving scam adverts (and my YouTube and Google adverts appear to be substantially more scam than not) is Alphabet saying they care more about profit than anything else and they should, quite frankly, be punished for it, both through things like fines from advertising standards bodies, and by more people taking matters into their own hands by using Adblock. I personally would also vote for any politician who put laws into place to make executives personally liable if their platforms are found to not do enough to get and combat fraud and scams on their platforms, because these companies actively profit from these scams through advertisement revenue.

Wrong - if Google can't make the money they need on YouTube then it's our problem. They'll need to run more ads and they'll take more draconian measures to ensure you can't block their ads. You can better believe they'll further monetize their efforts by selling the needed tech to other web sites. We all lose in that scenario.

YT is cheap like hell.

It has one of the most diverse high quality content I know.

Way of entry for producers/creators is tremendously low.

YT löst a lot of money for years.

If we are not even able to pay 12$ / month for YT what do you want? Everything for free adfree?

This isn't my problem.

That's a choice, no?

Ads are Google's main businesses, they should be responsible for vetting. Saying it's a scaling issue is a poor excuse, and if that is their legitimate stance then it should be used as evidence that the government needs to step in.

No, that's a choice. If Youtube hired 5k qualified people to vet their ad partners properly the problem would be solved tomorrow. It's "impossible" in the sense that this would eat into their profits rather than outsourcing the misery to the consumer.

- Newspapers end. Any news site, or social media peddling news in disguise, will never stop showing you content. Even if that content is something you won't like, and they know you won't like it, but they must retain you at all costs. They simply let you scroll forever. When I'm done with the paper I move on with my day.

- Newspapers are never written 'for you'. The paper clearly writes for an audience but not me as an individual. Not everything I see will be because an Algorithm or someone in product believes this will drive N% more clicks or revenue from me. I can better understand my own biases.

- Ads are obvious, clearly labeled, distinctly different from content, and often includes who paid for them. Ads are also not animated or obtrusive (if sometimes large), which if you turn off ad-block and go to any site these days is a jarring experience. Even sometimes with ad-block on.

[1]https://www.barnesandnoble.com/b/nook-newsstand/newsstand/ne...

The locally owned newspaper has none of this garbage whereas the "corporate owned" newspaper has ALL of it.

None of these problems will get better until 1) consumers pay for things they want, and waaaaaaay more importantly, 2) producers produce content that consumers are willing to pay for. So, it may just never happen.

Dude, I dream of my YouTube ads are being scams. I get greeted every time by a game ad. Some kind of dwarf dies on an apple being offered or something, and dying sounds like someone is throwing up. Please give me your scam ads.

When did ads stop even attempting to sell me anything? They don't even try anymore. Now they just show me thinly disguised images of dildos.

[1] Typical Example: https://i.imgur.com/sRu8s0I.png

It's Meta/Facebook's and Alphabet/Google's "business model".