That is something you just cannot avoid with a new medium. Eventually there will always be professionalization. It just sucks that youtube now just gives us the same shit over and over instead of making it easy to find new creators, like it used to be.
Hell I think you could make a massive improvement to the site if it could realize “Hey, I’ve been suggesting the same exact video to this user 500 times in a row, and he’s never clicked it. Maybe this user likes this creator/series, but not this specific video.”
I remember one of the early Youtube sensations was this teen chick’s vlog that turned out to be a fictional soap opera basically. Because it hadn’t occurred to anyone to do that yet.
This was BACK IN THE DAY, around the same time Boxxy became a sensation, or that one chick who just sat still in front of the camera because the Japanese liked her huge eyes.
lonelygirl15? I remember a friend telling me about that series because she wanted to share a funny video reply (Remember those?) by somebody who managed to find the same animal plushies that the girl carries around; it was a parody episode where the plushies talk about the current situation in the story and suggest that maybe the girl should drop all the teen drama stuff so they can all focus on running for their lives instead.
That’s the one, lonelygirl15. What a wild story. My internet destroyed brain immediately jumped to “Wow that was before the Youtube partner program, and it was presented as an authentic teen’s vlog at least at first…I wonder what the monetization strategy was?” And it turns out there kinda wasn’t one. They went into $50,000 worth of credit card debt to fund the series, according to Wikipedia. Like remember that episode of South Park (remember that show?) where they had the waiting room full of viral video people waiting to get their non-existent internet fame money?
Tbh, at this point there’s no reason in them disabling ad blockers. If you haven’t gotten used to this insane amount of ads by experiencing the slow, uphill creep, having to go from seeing no ads to suddenly this, is impossible. I couldn’t watch youtube videos in the current state of ads, so I’d just have one less vice.
I had already stopped once, when youtube vanced went offline (until i found revanced) and I will do it again
Fair enough. The thing is, do I vote for the near-anarchists, that, save for the anarchism, align with my principles? Do I vote for the party that is further away from my ideological beliefs, but doesn’t have the anarchism, and is a bit larger? Or do I vote for the main opposition, which is even further from me ideologically (and doesn’t seem to have much of a clear vision)?
That sounds like a question about how much you oppose anarchy. Any change, involves some loss of established order, so if the Overton window tells us something, is that “anarchist parties” are just the ones trying to push it stronger. Actual anarchists, wouldn’t try to be part of a government in the first place.
Okay, but then we still have the problem of FPTP. If I’m in a Labour dominated constituency and I vote LibDem, my vote wouldn’t matter cuz Labour will win anyways. And if I live in a Greens Stronghold and I vote Greens, my vote wouldn’t really matter, as they would have won with or without my vote. The way I see it, your vote can only make a difference in a constituency where there is no clear winner, and it’s everybody’s game.
Please correct me if I’m wrong in my assessment of the situation.
Then you want to fight FPTP and vote pruning by constituency, to make your vote matter.
You could vote blank, or a poop emoji to show your disconformity, but organizing or supporting a protest to reform the voting system might be more effective.
If we counted all those who don’t vote because it “doesn’t change anything”, those who vote blank or null, and those who vote knowing their vote will still get thrown away… it could actually make a majority.
I agree. It’s around $22 NZD and that is just too steep. They have a slightly cheaper one but you can’t background play with it. I’m sick of being nickel and dimed at every possible opportunity and then hearing about how these companies are making record profits.
It’s $25/mo for family. I hate that I pay for it, but I use music, and I mostly watch YouTube on a streaming device, so I’ve never been able to use ad blockers. $15 for the fam felt worth it, but $25 has me rethinking. Maybe I can configure YT-DL to get the shows I care about on my Plex
Any android based streaming device can run SmartTube (formerly SmartTube next). On an Android phone you can patch the YouTube apk with revanced, which also gives you full access to yt music.
Do you guys not get Youtube Premium Lite? It’s €7 per month to get rid of ads and doesn’t include stuff most people aren’t interested in like Youtube music.
I am not sure if it will work out like this though. The amount of ads they are forcing down peoples throat is isane. Eventually it will make people consume less videos and with that less ads overall.
I am not sure if it will work out like this though. The amount of ads they are forcing down peoples throat is isane. Eventually it will make people consume less videos and with that less ads overall.
Sure, could be - but keep in mind that they have all the relevant usage data at hand. Any decrease in service popularity among users (or indeed any kind of user behavior) is immediately visible to them. They have the means to know exactly what annoyances the market will bear.
And considering that YouTube still holds a de-facto monopoly on video discoverability within the entire anglophone internet I feel like it’s safe to say that the market will likely bear a lot more annoyances :P
capitalism (or at least the weird version of it used in the tech world) is about short term profit. if they get good numbers from this, they can make future projections of an imaginary increase over the years and make the ad companies happy for a while. they do not care about breaking the product in the long term
I know. This was just the intelligent person view. In reality, as you said, they only care about short term profit, and can you blame them? Things can change overnight in the tech world. Google (as a product) was undisputed until ChatGPT was released and integrated into Bing, now Alphabet is falling vehind and losing its dominance on the market.
Why would the ad companies back out if Youtube got rid of the people who were blocking their ads anyway? If anything, it makes Youtube a safer investment.
They’re already in hot water because of lying to their customers over this. They actually track ad blocker usage because lying about ads getting played when they weren’t would be fraud. In fact they’re getting sued by a whole bunch of advertisers because the “100% verified watched ads on Youtube.com” were actually playing in hidden frames on random websites.
I’m pretty sure the anti blocking, remote attestation direction Google is taking is an attempt to quickly fix this situation before it can get out of hand. They don’t know what ads plays are legitimate anymore and their customers are angry about it.
Worst case scenario, all Youtube advertisers over the last x years get their money back with some compensation, which would be devastating to Youtube as a product.
For me it’s quite strange. This first happened around 2 weeks ago, I was getting ads, however only the audio works as when the ad plays the screen is black.
I’m on Firefox with uBlock. Also I never got this popup, I just started getting ads with a black screen.
google has “fuck you” amounts of money, the minority of users using firefox mean nothing to them.
If google was having problems funding youtube, believe me, they’d stop paying creators before that would happen, and then the creators would tell us about it.
Do you really think they would stop paying creators before stopping people from bypassing the way both them and creators make money? It doesn’t take a business major to see that running a free service without ads is only going to cost them money.
I think (unsure) you misunderstand. Google, and any other company’s, main goal is to make money. To achieve this goal, i’m saying that if google were to lose profits from people using ad blockers, they are more likely to extract profits from their creators than sacrifice their bottom line.
If google can’t adequately monetize their services (by losing the ad-blocking war), they can’t monetize the creators. Google is evil, but so is the economic system that causes inconvenience to be the most effective way to monetize content.
This is why i wholeheartedly support things like Patreon, Ko-Fi, etc. because that directly supports creators and means that they don’t have to completely rely on a company that no longer says “don’t be evil”.
To achieve this goal, i’m saying that if google were to lose profits from people using ad blockers, they are more likely to extract profits from their creators than sacrifice their bottom line.
The creators are their product, the adblock users cost everyone money and provide no benefit, why would they punish their product over the users costing them money? The adblock users aren’t the bottom line, they are no benefit, and cost both YouTube and the creators in lost revenue.
This is why i wholeheartedly support things like Patreon, Ko-Fi, etc. because that directly supports creators and means that they don’t have to completely rely on a company that no longer says “don’t be evil”.
That’s great and all, but YouTube still has bills to pay, they can’t just let you use the service free without ads, let you just give money to creators through those other services, and expect to even break even.
“…why would they punish their product over the users costing them money?”
That’s if Google loses the ad-blocking war, hence the second paragraph, unless they manage to stuff web environment integrity/similar into their website, or if front ends like Invidious become more popular.
“…YouTube still has bills to pay…”
That’s true, but I think Google makes enough money from other things (tracking, other website’s ads) that it wouldn’t hurt them too bad. I think the recent crackdown on ad blocking is less from a large profit drop and rather to send a message to avoid the former from happening. Again though, I could be wrong about that one.
In the end though, I just want to watch and directly support my creators without being forced to waste 15 seconds of my life that I will never get back on a product I never have and never will use.
By making Youtube Premium worth it, both for users and creators. Make it transparent what % of the YP fee is actually going to creators, make that % actually fair, give extra features to YP users, incentivize creators to ask their viewers to collaborate with it if they actually can afford to. Youtube has reached a point where it has become a public utility, to the point that tens of millions of people use it to supplement their education or stay updated on the news. A website increasingly necessary shouldn’t force someone without a penny to choose between paying what they can’t afford or have their head fried up by ads.
Of course, this idea rooted in civil values is incompatible with an economic actor that sees both creators and consumers as cattle that must be milked as efficiently as possible.
A website increasingly necessary shouldn’t force someone without a penny to choose between paying what they can’t afford or have their head fried up by ads.
If not ads then what is the free option supposed to look like. I hate ads also, but it’s not like it’s sustainable to run free without ads.
Wikipedia has no ads yet it has a pretty large amount of spare money, and there are plenty of other free to use platforms and projects. Youtube is not Wikipedia, sure, but Wikipedia has no reason to offer Youtube Premium.
Are creators making enough money to get by on PeerTube? The idea is interesting, but I don’t see people making enough to do it full time, and I don’t see how the streaming quality can be anything as good or reliable compared to something like YouTube by relying on P2P.
Also, hasn’t youtube been wildly profitable for years? Profit, by definition is excess. It’s what’s left over after all business expense have been paid.
If youtube is profitable, why do they need more profit? Oh yeah, they don’t.
Why do you think you can’t upload more than a few megabytes of content to Lemmy? Serving video is expensive as hell, especially if you’re transcoding it into other resolutions.
As far as I know YouTube is not that profitable, but it’s hard to tell as they don’t release all the numbers.
Do you make any excess money? Do you have any money left over after rent, food, etc? If you do, do you need that money? If you don’t would you like to make more? Nobody wants to live with no excess money, so why should a business?
Woah dude, you’re getting right into my point of projection.
Just because you want to use your excess to get even more excess, you’re assuming that everyone else will. Why eschew luxurious so those who have less can have more? You’d never project that lol, cause that’s not how you feel.
Have a good day, man. Hope I enlightened you a bit.
Gonna block you now cause I feel you have nothing to offer me. See ya.
So you want to live just making ends meet? Don’t care about having a savings account? You would be happy with just enough to get by without any excess? I don’t know anybody who would be happy with that.
If you want to run away from the conversation then go ahead. If you do happen to have some money you don’t want though, since who needs to make more than what they need just to break even even, right? I’ll happily take it off your hands.
Thing is, even with all their efforts they still can’t make it profitable. Not sure if they release the data (doubt). But, YouTube has always been barely profitable or operating on loss. Google bought yt over 15 years ago and haven’t figured out how to make money off it and arguably made it worse with their policies and algos.
Part of the problem might be all those people blocking the ads, which I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a pretty big chunk of their viewers. No ads means no ad revenue, which means losing money.
As if video streaming will die with one site. One for-profit site, that’s not remotely turning a profit. A vestigial organ of an advertising giant, burning money to build dependency and exploit it for control.
BitTorrent used to share more video than Netflix - despite a lack of money, despite a lack of ads, and despite being illegal. Content creators will be fine without this corporate facade.
I don’t know what YouTube’s market share is, but for videos that are not short TikTok style it’s probably like 95%? And they are also in the TikTok short and twitch streaming areas now, so I think it would be a massive blow to video streaming if they went away.
BitTorrent just moves all the costs to the users, and users are typically not wanting to run their own video servers. They might work for tech people who don’t mind running servers or already have a server they are running, but you have to think about the regular user that is probably 80% or more of the market. You can’t expect to get big off relying on users to be the servers.
BitTorrent may have been big as in number of files, but as far as users and having content on demand it never got there. I remember waiting for days to get a single movie, not because my Internet was slow, but because the peers were slow.
When it comes to a YouTube replacement I don’t think you are going to get big relying on users to be the servers. Nevermind the fact that the nature of how BitTorrent works means no company will allow their content on it legally.
And nothing’s changed in all those years. Yeah? P2P technology couldn’t get any better than 2004. The fact it was slow sometimes means we’re boned forever.
Corporations already have streaming. I don’t care if they come along. Their content might be there whether they like it or not.
Consider where we’re having this conversation: is big even desirable? Has the dominance of one video platform been good for the internet? I’d say plainly fucking not, if killing ad blockers is even a feasible outcome. When YouTube was its own company there were a dozen competitors of similar size and quality. Google pouring money into one, so it could swallow everything and censor everyone and shove people toward right-wing propaganda, is not exactly ideal.
Has P2P changed much? I don’t think it has really. I use private sites for that stuff now and it’s great there, but the public stuff still seems pretty bad IMO.
Well if they don’t want their content there, then you have the whole problem if it being illegal. Now you have to convince people to break the law, and go as far as to install a VPN or whatever so your ISP doesn’t send you warnings. This isn’t a great start for something to replace YouTube.
I think Big is required for a P2P YouTube style thing to work. You need lots of peers to stream content in decent quality. You need people to knowingly break laws and use VPNs. You need people to run their own media servers, you are asking a lot from people, all YouTube is asking you to do is watch some ads or buy premium.
Oh no! Is the company that makes 70b per quarter and is buying back 70b of shares to keep making more in trouble of only making 80b per quarter next year and not 100b? Poor babies.
Maybe instead of looking at revenue you should look at profit. Revenue means nothing if your running costs eat it all up.
Also, maybe try to look at YouTube Numbers instead of the whole parent company? The patient company being profitable isn’t an excuse for the child company to lose money.
They are rolling this out in stages to users worldwide, It happened to me 3 weeks ago, on Brave, Firefox, and on Chrome. I had to junk Brave, update firefox, flush out my extensions (remove them) and reinstall, and now I run 6 different ad blocking and tracking extensions and its back working again. You should also know that Adblocker Ultimate are also involved and working on blocking their extension from working so they can sell premium app, which is now an app that runs on your computer, not an extension anymore.
It will be a cat and mouse game, which YouTube will loose in the long run. Don’t remember the name, but there is a very clever solution: They download all the ads so YT thinks you are watching. However, ads are never shown to you. This is extremely hard to detect and it muddies the data collection of Google since you watch and click everything.
IMO: This is a net loss for YT/Google. Their collection of data looses value. And advertisers wont be willing to pay the same amount for clicks, since a registered click is not necessary someone who watched and the targetting got worse…
Worst case of this solution is you might have to wait before watching your video. It wouldn’t be unreasonable for google to refuse to send you the video until $ad_duration has elapsed.
Still beats watching ads though. I could queue up a bunch in a “watch later” playlist and have a program get them all ready for me.
AdNauseam is a browser extension that uses the same idea to obfuscate tracking. I never used it myself, but it seems like a good alternative to blocking ads.
6 adblockers?! Have you looked into uBlock origins customisable block lists? You can combine at least 3 blockers with that. Additionally you could add custom block lists.
filterlists.com - list of auto-updating filters, makes it very easy to add one. Make sure to use one with a good rating.
Yeah, do it. uBlock is great in terms of performance so you will feel how much faster browsing is after uninstalling the other add-ons. You can also block known scams or websites known by pirates to be unsafe. It can also block cookie popups (but I don’t care about cookies might be better at this).
I also suggest Redirector, which lets you can set up custom redirects such as
<span style="color:#323232;">Pattern name: YT Shorts in normal player
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Example URL: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ExmplVid-ID → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExmplVid-ID
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Match pattern: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/*
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Redirect to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=$1
</span>
It is very powerful and can also replace multiple extensions. For example, it can percent-decode URLs, which enables me to prefix a URL with ar[space] in the address bar and redirect me to the archived version of that site. Just add https://web.aarchive.org/web/*/%s as a bookmark with keyword ar. (This trick is useful for making custom “search engines”, which would often require yet another extension.) However, this trick is not enough alone because it goes to https://web.aarchive.org/web/*/example.com%2Fpage and Archive.org needs a decoded URL. So notice that I used the nonsense address web.aarchive.org which Redirector will detect and correct using this rule:
Problem with that is, idcac accepts the cookies, ublock blocks the banner and thus you havent given consent and no cookies should be placed. Note that some websites might collect data regardless but there’s nothing much to do about it. ¯_ (ツ) _/¯
I’ve started to just download videos with yt-dlp after grabbing links via Invidious. Using Invidious itself has become somewhat unreliable lately, and this way I don’t have to put up with buffering and can watch in good quality. Cut out the middle men
Consider upping the cache for youtube. By default it is 2 minutes, which is mostly fine, except that if you are speeding through a part with 2x or faster, you may quickly run out of that small cache, because it only loads with the speed of something between 1x and 2x.
And then you may also set up saving the cache to disk instead of RAM, because it may be quite larger. Single config option.
You can make these only apply for youtube videos only with conditional auto profiles. The doc has an example for an automatic youtube profile, it’s perfect.
I don’t use the main YouTube website at all anymore. A big reason for this is that I spend a lot of time using a really weak laptop that tends to struggle with the JavaScript-laden abomination that is modern corporate web design. Firefox itself struggles as well, so I primarily use Luakit with Invidious, which runs peachy. I also put together a local html page for my bookmarks that is generated from Yaml using a small C application (which is not optimal, I know, but I’ve been learning C and this was a good opportunity). Whenever something doesn’t work in Luakit, I evade to Palemoon. I also tried watching YouTube via mpv earlier, and it’s great! It runs infinitely better than any web player at max resolution and buffers the whole video. Never going back.
Is it advertising if a community government makes citizens aware that bus service will be changing?
Is it advertising to tell people that there’s a suicide hotline available if they need help?
Is it advertising to encourage people to volunteer for a local festival?
What about telling people that the festival exists using a poster? Is that an ad? Does it depend if the festival is free or non-profit?
Advertising is just fundamentally about bringing people’s attention to something. The spectrum can range from a municipal government “advertising” its monthly meeting so that local people can participate in their local democracy, to spam emails hyping a pump-and-dump cryptocurrency.
Different people will have different ideas where the cut-off should be. The extreme libertarians will say that nothing should be banned. Others will say that it’s ok to ban ads for alcohol and cigarettes but not for makeup or coffee. Even totalitarian states and supposedly communist states where one entity controls all companies have ads. Some of the most striking ads ever made were for Mussolini.
So, the question really isn’t about banning ads, it’s just where to draw the line.
An increasing number of states are banning billboards along highways. Travelers do need a low tech method for finding certain services though, such as food, lodging, fuel and restrooms. So you’ll see those blue signs that says “FOOD NEXT EXIT” with a Waffle House and Burger King logo. In order to put the logo on that sign, the business has to meet certain criteria (which vary from state to state like all highway laws), for example a restaurant must be within 3 miles of the highway, be open for at least 12 hours a day and feature public restrooms and telephones. The sign itself may include a distinctive logo and the name of the business in legible font but no slogans or ad copy. “This burger restaurant is nearby.”
This I see as an appropriate amount of advertising.
It is a great example of how an industry can survive with only self-reported effectiveness. I remember a freakonomics episode where it was shown that very infrequently do companies get a positive return on marketing spending. It will be very interesting if that industry ever collapses.
They know. The fact that targeted ads leveraging so-called “big data” are not more effective than standard advertising is now known to the public. We can bet Google knew this years in advance. But they can’t abandon their whole business model since that would freak the stock market and investors out. So, they need to squeeze as much as they can before the entire model becomes unworkable and they’ll be forced to switch to something else or disappear.
Oh definitely. Its essentially a massive case of ‘it’s difficult to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on not understanding it.’
Same shit with Facebook claiming videos were the bestest content possible, using numbers sourced from the vicinity of their pelvis. Now every goddamn news site has autoplaying video for no damn reason.
Advertising is about creating trends, and catching some impulse buyers. Effectiveness is likely overstated, but on the other hand it’s difficult to quantify the effectiveness of a trend. I don’t think it’s likely to ever collapse, people will always want to believe they can influence others more than they actually can.
strawpoll.com
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