They did do something: they blocked people using adblockers.

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

They tried to block people using adblockers perhaps or maybe they rolled the block out in a non-uniform manner? I still haven't had any problems.

NoScript baby.

Really? So the advertising agency would have an Investigation Unit that makes sure the companies aren't scams before allowing them to advertise?

If they want to minimize their risk for liability, yes. If they want to freewheel or assume liability no. Let the market decide.

Some stuff can always slip through for sure but when more than half of the ads are looking illegal, that's going to be hard to invoke that they are doing due diligence.

Wasn't a problem with broadcast TV.

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

After advertising. Which is admittedly kind of useless in a world of anonymous, unaccountable, international advertisers.

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.

That sounds like a classic example of doing something and making the situation worse (aka almost every regulation ever)

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.)

> That sounds like a classic example of doing something and making the situation worse (aka almost every regulation ever)

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 ..

It is true that some regulation is meant to thwart competition and keep entrenched players in power. However it is pretty far to say "almost every regulation ever". Would you prefer to live in an age where anyone can sell a tincture on the sidewalk that claims to cure any ailment? Would you prefer to have the food you put in your mouth be a gamble on its quality? Would you prefer companies be able to dump their poisonous waste anywhere they want?

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.

"Fraud should be allowed, otherwise small companies can't rely on it to become big" is QUITE the take.

It's simply a question of fraud. Fraud is a crime. And aiding and abetting to commit a crime is a crime as well.

Why would they tho? As long as the ads pay, they win. Plus if people don't leave, and instead switch to the massively overpriced $15/m (or w/e) subscription, they make out even better.

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

> the massively overpriced $15/m

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.

> why do you consider this massively overpriced?

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.

Sidenote, i'd love to hear of platforms that are more creator first. Anyone have any recommendations for additional platforms that give money directly to creators?

Imho content is content and the creators get more when I pay, and I also don’t see ads. It’s win win and cheaper then other streaming platforms so I don’t see it being out of line cost wise.

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

Yea, i think i'd agree if i saw the revenue split or if they helped me understand what went to consumers. I'm not invested enough to research this (which isn't an excuse, just saying i'm not interested), so as a basic consumer my assumption is that the revenue i put into something like Patreon is far better than Youtube.

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.

Die Geister die ich rief, die werd ich nun nicht los

YouTube offers an ad-free service.

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

It does, but Youtube still collects your data and sells it to advertisers. So watching a video on Youtube could mean seeing targeted ads on other platforms. So the solution is to always use adblocking everywhere.

If the "ad-free" service features videos with inline ads, it's not really ad-free.

It serves the authors content ad-free. You can choose to subscribe to authors that do not place ads or sponsored content in 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

> It serves the authors content ad-free.

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.

The inline ads are part of the content you're watching, not injected by YouTube. You may not like them, but there's a distinction.

Yes there's distinction internally, but as the consumer I care that I'm getting ads more than the details

Interesting incentives. Watch scam ads, use an ad blocker (no longer allowed), or pay Google to go ad-free.

Looks like Google benefits by allowing scammy ads...

This doesn't let you turn off the recommendations algorithm. A huge chunk of Youtube videos are essentially ads. No dice.

Ublock Origin is great at anti-adverts and anti-anti-adtech.

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

The solution is paying for content, but it's been shown over and over again that the vast majority of people won't pay for most of the content they consume.

It's been shown that when companies will run products at a massive loss for years in order to capture a monopoly that most customers will make the individually rational choice of taking the free service offered.

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 think people won't pay for licenses to access to content (well they already are). But I think it comes down to the tangibility of the product in question. Digital licenses to access content can come and go at a whim. No thanks.

Paying for it has added consideration "costs" of commitment and calls for more checking out before watching it if it would be worth it or not. Viewers come easier when they can try before they buy and the quality threshold for "would pay money for" is much higher than "would pretend to pay attention to ads for". Not paying for content thus has less friction to it.

Seems like the content market is due for a correction, then. If people are sick of toxic ads, and toxic ads pay for content, but nobody else wants to pay for the content, the content can just die and we'll figure something else out I'm sure.

I think you're on the right track. Unfortunately, the toxic "free" model with ads has trained everybody to expect all content for free. This is completely unsustainable; there will be a correction of some sort, and it's my opinion that we've already entered that stage. It's going to be painful, but I'm hopeful that the end state is that people consider ad-laden "free" content to be not worth their time. I'm already there.

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.

Why do you believe that youtube and facebook aren't sustainable? They seem sustainable to me.

I'm also a Kagi user! I'm leaning towards using products that I pay for that promise me a dignified experience. I worry though, that we're heading to future where there's a class of people that do not see ads and have some degree of privacy and a class of people that do see ads and have no privacy and I fear for their minds and that culture, as I do not think that system lends itself to narrowing any inequality gaps. I worry for increasingly ad supported hardware. I worry. ;)

I think people would pay. Ads offer more money then people are willing to pay. Alot of content is expensive for what it offers.

I agree, and I think part of the correction would be because of your latter point.

I'm not so sure, people pay for Netflix and Spotify and other content services. Maybe most of the content on YouTube is not worth paying for?

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.

YouTube has a lot of content that is the highest quality of any platform. It also has a ton of crap content, because they simply have an enormous amount of content. It's like a supermarket in that sense. You could refuse to go there and buy the highest quality beef because you don't like that they also sell soft drinks and processed candy bars in the front.

Youtube has a wealth of highly valuable content that is very niche. I'd love for someone to figure out how to pay the creators of that content via a paid platform like netflix or spotify, many have tried, and no one has succeeded yet.

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

Entirely coincidental, but, Google(1998-) is nearing the age of Sun Microsystems(1982-2010) when it died.

And the same age when Microsoft saw (then) record profits, as well as Amazon (though the pandemic did help). Can't exactly make a one-to-one comparison on a single datapoint alone

It would be a sick and ironic twist of fate if it met the same end. Oracle was quite unhappy at the time, with Google building their own DB.

> Entirely coincidental

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

This goes beyond adblock; Google/FB can/have easily overridden that. What we need is regulation, like there is for TV, radio and magazines.

This is like going back ~20 years and trying to stop publishers from placing shady ads in cheap yellow papers.

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.)