Somehow, I’m not even able to see ads on my system. I have firefox with ublock, sync on my three systems macOS, linux and windows. Not a single ad in years. I’ve tried to disable ublock, just to see the mess, and it still wont play ads. Lol. Anyway, I will stop watching youtube before watching ads. I always watch the sponsor thing tho.
I dont even mind ads when its like one minute for 20 minutes of footage. Pluto TV is free to use and has commercial breaks but they never really bother me because they aren’t that annoying and i get a lot of MST3K before I watch them. Youtube ad are cancer in comparison.
that’s the funny part. i also didn’t mind ads once in a while, but when i started looking for a YT solution i not only found one but i also found sponsorblock. i didn’t know of it before the YT bs. now i just don’t see ads at all. thanks YT!
Seriously, I wouldn’t even bother futzing with adblockers on my Android TV if it was reasonable, but fucking 45 seconds of ads for every 5 minutes of content is just ridiculous. I almost wonder if it was all an experiment to see how much they could get away with…
Same the normal ads aren’t much of an issue for me, especially since some are skippabke. But about a year or so ago, I was getting 30 minute ads. They were skippable, but if I was just playing the shows in the living room while making dinner in the kitchen or whatever, I had to constantly go hit the button on the remote or be stuck watching 30 minute infomercial for a product I’d never even consider buying. Are they still allowing these long ads?
Good, fuck those greedy bastards. yt-dlp + mpv with sponsorblock FTW, bonus points for stopping using a YouTube account altogether and using RSS feeds for your subscriptions instead.
I’m more than happy to support my favourite content creators by other means, be it simple donation or merch. I will never subject myself to stupid ads, no matter the reason.
YouTube are fully within their rights to crack down on adblockers, as they have done in the past. Content delivery is not free, and they are not a charity.
YouTube provides two ways to “pay” for your content: with ads, or by paying for premium.
Tech companies have an unhealthy habit of making things free or cheap to gain a userbase, then increasing the price. The biggest problem with this imo is that it sets expectations with users that these things should be free
I am not going to get into an argument about what price is “fair” or whether Google can “afford it”. All I know is that for now, they continue to run YouTube, but nothing stops them from shutting it all down tomorrow if they decide it’s not profitable enough.
As for myself personally, I watched YouTube with ads for the last 2 or 3 years, and more recently I decided to start paying for YouTube Premium.
YouTube Premium made sense for me because:
I was spending more than 3 hours a day on YouTube (in the background or as the thing I’m actively watching.
I could afford it now that my financial situation had improved
Creators get significantly more money from YouTube Premium watchers (or so I’ve heard)
Before all of that, I used to use YouTube Vanced (RIP) and NewPipe, both great though not entirely legit ways of bypassing ads and downloading videos. I still use the latter to archive the really good content I come across.
If you’re ok to pay for YouTube, but it’s too expensive for the value you get out of it, there are alternative approaches. You can spoof your location and buy YouTube Premium in another country, like Turkey or India, and get it for as low as $2 a month. Google doesn’t crack down on this much at the time of writing.
I can understand your point of view. I was grandfathered in at $16 a month for the family plan for years since I was around from the beginning. Then I got an email telling me it’s going up to $22 a month. I used premium for music and ad free only. I don’t care about movies or anything else. I would still happily be paying for premium today at the understandable $16 dollars but they got greedy so now I use Revanced and pay nothing. I am also trying out Grayjay since it combines a lot of platforms.
They’re absolutely within their rights to try and block ad-blockers. And users are fully within their rights to circumvent the blocks in order to protect their privacy and the security of their machines and the data on them, as Google has proven repeatedly to be either uncaring or incompetent when it comes to ensuring the ads they serve aren’t spreading malware.
YouTube provides two ways to “pay” for your content: with ads, or by paying for premium.
Not quite, unfortunately. You can pay by watching ads in addition to being surveiled, or by paying for premium and being surveiled potentially even harder (because you have to have an account with personal and payment information). Google does not stop tracking you and selling your profile just because you pay for Premium, so it’s not an option for me.
I hadn’t thought of it from a privacy perspective.
I couldn’t imagine using YouTube not signed in because of the dogs**t recommendations you get then. I imagine if you’re signed in the privacy loss is not significantly less than if you paid for Premium too.
I also use GMail so I’m already f***ed from that. I’ve basically given up on privacy at any other time than when I want to do private things, and I use a VPN and private browser.
I honestly have more than enough content on Youtube to watch without having to rely on recommendations, and I intentionally do not use Google accounts in any other capacity either. So yeah, for me Youtube Premium is just not an option even though I would be open to pay for the content. Hell, I even do donate to some individual creators through other platforms already. If Google wants my money they shouldn’t have killed the separate Youtube account and shouldn’t have forced everything into their surveillance-ad business.
Is it? I don’t like shorts and I don’t like them cluttering up my feed. On desktop I can simply turn them off with an extension. On mobile, I’ll constantly get bombarded by content I don’t care for with no way to turn it off. So yeah, i hope not
I have an extension that hides shorts from my feed. the other day I used my account on the ps4/TV and oh my… shorts everywhere.
I need a way to block specific channels too (or mute them) without unsubscribing as there’s one in particular I want to remain subbed too (it’s a community thing) but over his bullshit 6 videos a day spam
I don’t know what the whole fuzz was / is about, it’s years now that I unwillingly watched ads, anywhere. So easy, piehole, newpipe, avoid any Microsoft shit, you just have to be ready to learn a bit, it’s not rocket science. Ok, rocket science helped, but that’s not the point…
No, I think the advertisers learned of ad blockers and started putting pressure on the new CEO. “Why am I paying you $X,000,000 for an ad buy that people can just block? And you’re not doing anything about it?!”
So they put some development resources behind it, make some noise, get the internet in a tizzy, so the advertisers feel like they’re being heard and listened to and some progress is being made. Then later they can say, “hey look, less than 1% of ads are being blocked on our platform but views have gone up by 6%, so we’ll only increase the ad cost by 5% this year and call it even.”
Boom, everyone wins and they can drop it, at the cost of just a little bit of their dignity and self-respect.
The advertisers are only paying for seen ads, not ads that are blocked.
And people that block ads weren’t likely to click on any to begin with, which benefits advertisers because they get a higher clickthrough rate.
Google doesn’t want to be providing a good service to anyone though, they want money. Low clickthrough with high views makes Google more money (and costs the advertisers more money and the viewers more time).
The music subscription service is older than YouTube Premium. It started as Google Play Music, then YouTube Premium was rolled in, then they replaced Google Play Music with YouTube Music.
The ol’ switcheroo-to-boost-youtube-premium-subscribers-to-make-it-look-good-to-shareholders trick.
I had a google play music subscription. They bundled it into YouTube, dumped the play music app, and it’s equivalent on the YouTube platform is garbage, never understanding that hey, sometimes people don’t have a data connection and failing to load even the songs in my phone.
I considered dropping it then and going over to Spotify then, this price hike might be what finally does it.
Ironically that is how you get better content. If you don’t engage and let the algorithm find you content, you’re going to get generic crap. Unfortunately. You can use logged-in Youtube to find stuff and NewPipe to watch it.
I have to agree with this. As much as we all hate the algorithm because it’s what brings us those thumbnails and annoying begging from creators it actually works. It just takes time to find some good people. Though I wouldn’t mind a post on lemmy with everyone sharing their favorites.
Steve Mould, Smarter Every Day, Real Engineering, Vsauce, NightHawkInLight, NileRed, How to Make Everything
Food
Joshua Weissman, Guga Foods, Sous Vide Everything, Andy Cooks, Uncle Haji’s Kitchen, Tasting History with Max Miller, Babish Culinary Universe, Yueng Man Cooking
Chill
Serpa Design, MD Fish Tanks, Ben’s Worx, NileBlue, ClickSpring, The Samurai Carpenter, Kris Harbour, Just Alex, Ly Thi Ca, Hoàng Huong, Primitive Skills (these last 3 are silent channels from Vietnam. I’ve linked them since these are hard to search for in a sea of that type of content)
Entertainment
mrnigelng, Will Stelter, Thack Ironworks, shurap, Frog Leap Studios, Andrew Huang, Rob Scallon, look mum no computer
Well I for one love Both Hank and John Green, Smarter Everyday, Lock Picking Lawyer, Nilered, Jdraper, Kyle Hill, Electroboom, Project Farm, Dr Gloucomflecken, Casual Geographic, Villain Support, Tested, Tom Scott, Frog Leap Studios, Natural Habitat Shorts, Oxventure, Kerzgeszagt, and Glen and Friends Cooking to name a few.
Friendlyjordies (main and podcast), Hello Future Me, Louis Rossman, Tom Nicholas, Abroad in Japan, Crunchycat, James Tullos, stephen tries, sidemen, rachel and jun, jun’s kitchen, healthygamergg are a bunch off my watch later list.
what are you interested in? everytime I dip my toe into a new interest I’m always blown away by the sheer volume and quality available on YouTube. right now I’m using it to supplement duolingo to help learn a new language, something I never tried before
If you watch the news and one movie you also reach 3 hours.
I watch 30 min in the morning while getting ready (usually late night shows from the previous day - mostly listening), 30 minutes to an hour during lunch (LTT, MKBHD, other tech channels or maybe a car review) and a longer session in the evening when the kids are in bed (documentaries or chess tutorials, or programming content, or something longer/more in depth where I can dedicate my full attention).
What happened to the idea of small, non-intrusive banner ads? Of course it’s not realistic to expect those on YouTube and they bring much less revenue compared to in-your-face video interstitials per impression, but I’m much more likely to whitelist those.
What happened to the idea of small, non-intrusive banner ads
You answered your own question:
they bring much less revenue compared to in-your-face video interstitials per impression
And shortsighted profit driven thinking - can make a load more money now even if some users are pissed off, don’t worry about long term user retention. Oh what!?! The usersbase is pissed and leaving/blocking things, better double down to keep them profits high in the mean time…
I love that all the centralized social media networks are scrambling to become shitty for profits right around the time users are realizing that they don’t need centralized servers to host their user-generated content. Users can take their content wherever they want and let these platforms die.
It’s like we’re reverting to the days you would go to homestarrunner.com, illwillpress, etc to see content from people you actually wanted to see content from. Honestly looking forward to it
This 100%. Look at forums. Back in the early days, there were lots of little independent forums. Sites like Reddit took over because you could easily keep your identity across multiple forums and see the content from all your communities on one page. We gained convenience, but didn’t think too hard about what we were losing or who we were losing it to. Then along came enshittification and we are collectively realizing what we lost. Federation is of course the solution. As I see it, the only missing piece is monetization. Platforms like YouTube make it easy to monetize page views, Twitter / X is doing the same. That’s much harder in the fediverse.
Ads suck. And honestly, if we had less content creators, they’d be fine. There are a lot of absolutely degenerates out there. Let’s cull the herd a bit and let us speak individually with our wallets.
That’s a fair point. Patreon, or whatever comes next, needs to drastically reduce friction. That by the way is why Amazon is so successful, reducing purchase friction. Right now if you have something that a million people will take for free, and you start to charge just one penny for it, your audience of a million will drop to like 12. Not because people don’t want to spend a penny, but because they don’t want to fill out a form and put in their name address credit card number expiration date security code phone number email address etc. If there was a button they could click that was like ‘instant donate 5 cents’ most people would click that a lot.
The closest thing I’ve heard to that was a crypto called basic attention token, which aimed to do just that. They are making a big mistake though in that they are only integrating with Brave browser rather than making a universal plug-in. So the idea of a universal solution is still a ways off I guess. But I think to make it zero friction it will have to be crypto based in some way.
you could easily keep your identity across multiple forums and see the content from all your communities on one page
RSS feeds have provided this experience for years. The problem is that a lot of sites stopped serving RSS feeds for their content. But sites like rss.app and openrss can be used to get RSS feeds for sites that don’t have them.
RSS is great for content consumption. It’s a shame that many sites stopped serving it- same thing with podcasts, now everyone wants you to listen on this or that platform instead of just publishing a normal RSS feed full of MP3 files.
That said though, RSS doesn’t help for participation, it’s a one-way tech.
I guess if you have forums that put out RSS feeds you could aggregate them together for post titles, but that’s still clumsy. Lemmy does it much more elegantly.
My understanding of RSS is that it’s basically a list of metadata and links for content… Its always seemed to me to be a great way to aggregate the content you want to see. He did specifically mention keeping an Identity across multiple forums and I’m not aware of any RSS implementation that provides that functionality though… are you? That’s a huge feature to miss if we’re talking about social link aggregators like Reddit and Lemmy.
Yeah, sorry I was specifically replying to part about seeing the content from communities (or everything on the internet, really) in one view. Keeping your identity across multiple forums is platform-specific and would be solved by Lemmy directly. RSS feeds would just give you the updates and the links directly to the content. But once you click through to go to each website, you’d just be using your already-logged-in state on the platform.
One of the main advantages of RSS is that it doesn’t track you or require an account for it to work. As you said it’s only a XML or JSON file wth the latest items posted on the website.
Maybe we don’t need 4K 60FPS video to show Mr. Beast giving away more crap. Just because we can up the quality, doesn’t mean we should. Or maybe client-side real-time AI upscaling will make this a non-issue.
Call me old fashioned but I’d rather see high native quality available for when it is relevant. If I’m watching gameplay footage (as one example) I would look at the render quality.
With more and more video games already trying to use frame generation and upscaling within the engine, at what point is too much data loss? Depending on upscaling again during playback means that you video experience might depend on which vendor you have - for example, an Nvidia computer may upscale differently from an Intel laptop with no DGPU vs an Android running on 15% battery.
That would become even more prominent if you’re evaluating how different upscaling technologies look in a given video game, perhaps with an intent to buy different hardware. I check in on how different hardware encoders keep up with each other with a similar research method. That’s a problem that native high resolution video doesn’t have.
I recognize this is one example and that there is content where quality isn’t paramount and frame gen and upscaling are relevant - but I’m not ready to throw out an entire sector of media for this kind of gain on some media. Not to mention that not everyone is going to have access to the kind of hardware required to cleanly upscale, and adding upscaling to everything (for everyone who’s not using their PS5/Xbox/PC as a set top media player) is just going to drive up the cost of already very expensive consumer electronics and add yet another point of failure to a TV that didn’t need to be smart to begin with.
The quality is something that depends on the content. If the video is just someone talking, 4K is overkill. And not every gameplay has to be recorded forever. Only the good ones. And even the videos can be rescaled after some time if nobody sees them.
This exists. For example, for general decentralized storage, there’s storj.io, and there’s PeerTube. But I guess there’s a reason it’s not more widespread. I’d happily be proven wrong, though.
I mean, I might have considered paying for YT premium if I thought it offered some value (other than disabling ads) but I won’t sure as hell pay for anything that any company is trying to blackmail me into.
One could argue that we’re paying for it without our consent, given the fact that Google doesn’t pay anything in taxes. That’s a cool four billion a year (at least) that they get from the American taxpayer for free.
But that’s the wrong way around. They don’t want you to pay, they make their money through advertising. They make far more money from advertiser’s paying to put up ads than they ever make from people paying for premium.
Same as with Facebook now bringing in an ad-free version (in the EU anyway) - they charge higher than is reasonable so that people will opt for the ad-supported free version instead.
It’s not that you are blackmailed into paying premium, it’s that you’re encouraged not to as a way of explicitly consenting to ads.
Basically, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
lmao you’re so wrong on ads being more profitable than premium, especially on a per-user basis
According to this you can expect to make around $18/1000 views. That’s with 55% going to the creator and 45% to Google. Which means that Google makes around $14.5 per 1000 views.
Coincidentally, that’s also rougly the price of YouTube Premium. Are you telling me that you watch a thousand videos per month?
I use it because YouTube music is included and it’s great while driving, it allows background play even with the screen off (I’m talking about mobile).
There’s something more, but nothing that a pro user cannot already do with third tools.
Abandoning YouTube is seriously more difficult than abandoning other “non-fediverse” general social media platforms, since it’s got so much useful content that gets straight up ruined by the company that owns the website.
I doubt PeerTube is anything better than Vimeo, at least for now, things can improve after all.
At this point, I don’t even care about the user tracking. I just don’t want to sit through unskippable ads anymore. Especially when it’s the same ad over and over again.
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