They should fucking do an experiment - 2€/$ a month for an ad-free subscription and 3€/$ a month for higher video quality+no ads subscription. I would fucking pour my money into it.
Oh wait, that would not solve lack of sponsorblock. I guess I am not interested then…
Not a penny to those bastards. Should YouTube and Google along with it rot to hell, I don’t care. Maybe we’d finally get better alternatives running at full capacity.
For now our best chance for free platform is Odysee/Lbry - at least crypto bros can keep tue platform running for the sake of it. Or PeerTube, but less likepy since it’s more enthusiasm-driven, and enthusiasm only gets you so far.
Also, Nebula, CuriosityStream and other similar subscription services are good - and people pay for them.
I pay for Youtube, but I’m clearly in the minority. Look at all the pitchforks in this thread not willing to pay one cent or watch one ad but demanding the content…
There is a difference, though, and I know why those pitchforks are raised. YouTube is a video service behemoth, and it is owned by Google, a Big Tech company that has little respect for its users. It is one of the last things most Lemmy users (known on average for their hate of Big Tech, hence why we don’t have this discussion on Reddit) would want to support.
Many of them would, and some do, support alternatives. But there is just nothing to the scale of YouTube, which exacerbates the problem as users often have nowhere else to go. And so they will do their best to use YouTube in a way that gives 0 benefits to Google, and will only be happy to see this giant fall and replaced by something more user-centric, free from corporate control, and privacy-friendly.
I appreciate that, but I don’t think the vast majority support alternatives. It’s just “I want it free and I want it now”.
Also, if you don’t support Google you most probably don’t support the creators, very few of them have patreon or similar and just rely on ad revenue/sponsors.
I am not bothered by Google at all, at least in the EU you have pretty good control about the data they collect and I feel it’s used well. I get pretty good recommendations on YouTube and the ads I get on other sites are at least somewhat relevant.
I see the chances of a competitor replacing it and being more privacy-friendly close to none. Maybe TikTok will replace YouTube over as GenZ takes over, and I see that as a solid negative.
They literally had that experiment with Premium Light. €6 for ad free watching, it was all I needed. But they literally sent out a mail they were stopping this tier right before they started implementing more anti-ad blocking measures.
Oddly enough, the “lite” subscription was introduced in some other countries during the time they shut it off in the launch countries.
I wonder if they’re testing willingness to spend using the cheaper sub, then pulling it if it turns out people are likely to buy the pricier plan once the lower tier isn’t available anymore?
I had the light subscription for over a year, not planning on paying for useless stuff like the music stuff though. Had it through a family plan years before and it was laughably bad compared to Spotify.
Options are of course great. What makes YT music a better option than Spotify Premium for you if I might ask? I found when I was trying it years ago it didn’t seem to have an all encompassing music library. (It not having 10 years of playlists and recommendations that I do actually enjoy for new music is something I missed but couldn’t count against it as a product ofcourse)
I much prefer the UI and it (used to?) allow uploading my own music where the offering was lacking. Notably, Spotify also didn’t have these songs, so having them in one library is great. The recommendations are also spot on for me, but like you said that could be attributed to having used it for a long while (used Play Music pretty much from its inception).
Considering I’d want to pay to get rid of ads on YouTube too having the music service bundled is a bonus. I used to pay for the music service standalone before that.
I bet that Spotify will do just fine now, although last time I tried (some time last year) I didn’t immediately like the UI, and the shuffle seemed to work oddly in large playlists. What it does have over YT Music for sure is integrations with other parties, I wish YT was better in that regard.
Thanks for the feedback, my most recent car does have a native YT music app so if I can keep a decent music library along with no ads it would be worth considering.
And Spotify shuffle in large playlist was plain broken for years indeed. I could have 1000+ songs in a list and shuffle would loop 20 of them.
I actually do subscribe but only because I get a deal through my mobile network that, long story short, cuts the price by two thirds.
I can’t understand their pricing policy at all. And they’re doing a terrible job at explaining their cost basis if it’s actually what it costs to serve video to us (highly doubt it).
Meh I had nebula a couple years ago and it had some missing features and fairly poor depth of content. The same few bits constantly being pushed. I’m hopeful it improves but I wasn’t using it.
Nebula is pretty awesome and the type of content is great. I miss some light entertainment content though, so the network effect is at work. Still, nebula is the only streaming platform I’d consider subscribing as their policy is great and they do provide good value.
I’m not really certain what value nebula provides other than some creators uploading occasional content exclusively on nebula. Without nebula they’d just… Upload it to YouTube, which is free, so I’m not sure what the difference is
Nebula can only afford to do that because basically nobody who subs to nebula actually watches the videos on it. They did a video about their revenue model and people treat it as a way to support the creators, not to actually watch content
Could Nebula work as a Patreon-competitor. Patreon as a company is totally fucked iirc - the investors are treating the company like a piggy bank, which is a shame because it is easily a profitable and viable company.
They’d absolutely 100% be losing money with a $2 ad free tier. Ads make significantly more than that per user per month. Same with your “”“solution”“” for higher res video. Bandwidth is goddamn expensive.
I agree, but they’d get a large number of users to subscribe.
And then maybe they wouldn’t complain when they raised the price to $3. And a few months later maybe $3.50. Then $5.
A few years ago, people wouldn’t have paid over $15 for a standard Netflix tier without 4K. But the way to boil a frog is to make them nice and comfy in lukewarm water, then keep increasing the temperature slowly… So even if they lose money, maybe a low price for the ad-free YouTube could make sense, from a business perspective.
Every time Netflix rises prices it makes it to the news (let alone all the drama on twitter/reddit/etc), I don’t know what frog boiling you’re talking about.
Yet they keep posting more and more profits. Subscriber count has only increased despite the content being lower quality and prices being higher. The fact that we don’t like them increasing the prices doesn’t mean it isn’t working for them.
I’m not arguing it will work forever, but for now, it’s been a viable strategy.
Plus, no way would it ever stay at that price. Nothing ever does. The only service I pay for now is spotting, and that’s just to have ad-free music on my half-hour drive to work.
I went the route of accepting their 2-month trial of Premium, and immediately disabled it from continuing after the 2 months. Hopefully that’s enough time to come up with an acceptable solution that works the way I want it to. Honestly, if Premium was like $5/month, they’d get my money. But for almost triple that? Fuck no, never happening.
There was a post yesterday saying that the price of YT Premium Family in Australia is almost literally doubling next month (+88% IIRC). People from a few other regions reported similar. Completely insane.
While it’s unlikely that they won’t attempt to get something similar to WEI onto the internet at some point, they have recently given up on this iteration of the concept.
I agree with you that such efforts are always a threat, and I’m reminded both of the V-Chip and the current efforts in the UK to keep blokes from watching their porn (anonymously, that is, without ending up on a registry of porn watchers), what may end up adding the right to porn access as a specific chartered right in our universal charters (and some national / state charters). Here in California, the right to produce porn is explicitly established in state law, which is embarrassing to some, a point of pride to others.
The MPAA and RIAA also tried to get all the ISPs to agree to shut down (or throttle) service after twelve strikes by an anti-piracy board, who would track the IP addies of torrents. This fueled the development of magnet links (now the standard). And meant that Xfinity and AT&T had to be extra shitty to customers due to causes they don’t care about, while folks are already desperate to disconnect from them in favor of an alternative. So they haven’t really be enforcing it.
And yes, Google is retreating on the WEI thing for now (if only they could get the federal government to pass a law) but the blowback on an eventual universal DRM is going to be severe, including revealing to the world that TPMs don’t do what they are supposed to do as explained to the end-user, making them hostile architecture. It’ll also potentially send increased traffic (and increased business) into the EU, or out of the US into less traceable regions, and get the determined end-user interested in the dark net, because watching a cat video without ads now requires the same savvy as getting access to CSAM, active revolutionary news and restricted chemistry configurations.
What will be more interesting to me are the consequences I haven’t imagined. To quote a favorite princess, The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
Anyway, the go ahead and downvote me line is creepy, and brushes against poisoning the well I don’t downvote dissenting opinions, (and can’t, anyway from my Lemmy instance).
Oh I definitely don’t have a better plan than ublock origin folks, they are still the best. But there’s also a way to programmatically exploit the skipable ads to instantly skip without any countdown shenanigans. It’s not blocking the ads but I never see them. And it was a good stopgap for when the shit first hit the fan.
I searched “YouTube adblocker” on both google and DDG. The first mention of ublock origin was in the 1st page of Google (just at the bottom, under “recommended adblockers for Firefox”, the 2nd option). There was no mention of it on DDG, even though I clicked “more results” once (so searched the equivalent of 2 pages). The problem with Google search is not google, it’s SEO, that affects all search engines.
Thing is, searching with DDG takes time to get used to, as it doesn’t work the same way as Google. Google uses a lot of convenient algorithms that are also a double edged sword.
Send email to your fav. Youtubers to start a channel on Odyssey. Hope we get a comparable alternative. Odyssey is pretty good. Load time is less and video quality is great. Just need content creators. Does anyone know if Odyssey pays its content creators?
I’m not sure it’s a platform that should be promoted. It is incredibly laden with alt right content, even worse than the stuff YouTube frequently attempts to drive me toward. It’s also just another publicly traded company. It’s affiliated with that Truth Social stuff as well.
Because those were set up under the idea of ‘free peach’, not under the idea of ‘this neoliberal demonic brood is sucking us dry’… The others just think that YouTube is leaving money laying around by kicking nazis off. I suggest leaving them alone in their safe space.
Which shitshow? Imo that’s like saying the internet is forever stained by whatever “shitshow” there was. It’s just a technology, there are good and bad applications
The GPU market being wrecked by motherfuckers that wanted to build crypto farms, the cryptocurrency scams, the NFTs, etc.
And the greatest problem of all with crypto is that it is a solution for a non-existing problem. The web worked fine without it and it proved to be way more stable than crypto ever could.
For example, I live in Russia, and the only way for me to support creators I like is sending them crypto. All traditional channels were blocked by sanctions; crypto can’t be. Besides, it’s irreplaceable for political activists and many other people who can be cut off funding on a whim.
I’m not a crypto maximalist saying Bitcoin should replace national currencies, but I understand the value and power of crypto. It does have its place in the world.
As for mining, primary reason for GPU market shitstorm (which affected me personally as a non-miner and gamer) was mining Ethereum, which has now changed its validation model and does not need any GPUs anymore.
Cryptocurrency scams and NFT bubbles are real, and I urge people to he aware of them. But it doesn’t mean crypto should die.
Oh sure I’m not a huge fan of the GPU shortages, though very few crypto things need them anymore
a solution for a non-existing problem
Depends entirely on where you live and if you trust your government, but yes the USA and most Europen countries are fine in general. I personally just prefer anything that can be decentralized. That’s why I’m on Lemmy, after all, haha
Depending on how you look at it. It’s not perfect, but it is something, and it allows creators profits to scale up with the platform. I’d like if they’d get a choice between that and traditional payouts, though, and recognize Odysee/Lbry is not the final holy grail for hosting video content.
Like a week ago, the company behind Odyssey lost a lawsuit and will be shutting down. As of now, no one knows what happens to Odyssey in the future. Maybe some other company buys it and continues to run it. Maybe it changes into something totally different. Maybe it just shuts down.
if you click ublock, select the settings cog, then in the tab that opens select ‘my filters’, you can enter the following to do the same thing: www.youtube.com##.ytd-rich-section-renderer.style-scope
Personally I avoid installing too many extentions as they are quite literally apps that auto open whenever you just want to browse the web (regardless of if you’re going to youtube, you’re computer runs a youtube specific adblock)
Yeah youtubes attempt at being tiktok is just awful and they don’t even have options to not have shorts show up in the feed. On top of shorts just being inferior versions of regular videos without functional controls
This is what gets me. Wanna show me shorts? Ok. But why the fuck am I not allowed to rewind a couple of seconds if I want to? It’s an artificial, completely useless limitation that had no place in 2023.
I switched to FreeTube and now all the shorts are on a separate page I can switch over to if I feel like watching them. It’s also got SponsorBlock built in. Now I can enjoy youtube with a clean, faster interface and google isn’t tracking a damn thing. All because google got greedy and made their user experience shit.
Google didn’t get greedy, it’s doing what it’s been doing for years. Before resorting to plunging us into Matrix-like pods, they’re trying to squeeze some more data out of users.
I only wish PiP worked the way it does in Firefox, not in Edge/Chromium. I like to have my browser next to full height video on my ultrawide, but PiP will not go beyond 1080 pixels tall.
First thing I did when the shorts spam apocalypse started, was create custom ublock filters to strip them out of youtube as much as I could. Too bad I didn’t back them up before my system decided to go poof.
Thanks for the hint! I mostly just ignored the shorts, but I just added that filter list to uBlock in firefox on android and it is much more pleasant when they’re not there in the first place.
It’ll show me a couple of videos, then shorts, then some kind of recommendation list. If I actually want to do a complete search for the thing, and only the thing, I’m looking for, I have to go to advanced options and specify I’m looking for videos. JUST videos.
I don’t even care about the shorts showing up in search results. What really irks me is that you get like 3 videos related to search results, then some random unrelated shit, 3 relevant videos, more unrelated garbage, and then the rest of the actually relevant videos. I am specifically searching for something, just show me the damn thing.
Yes. The way the default search now works is that, when you search you get:
Three or four videos that are actually from your search.
Some recommended playlists.
The shorts tray that vaguely has some content related to your search.
Maybe two or three more videos from the actual search.
“People also watch” recommendations.
“Shorts for you” recommendations.
If you want to get just your search results, cutting away shorts, playlists, and the recommendations that take up the majority of the search page, you’ll have to open up the filters and click on “videos” on the cl tent type list. Then you actually get to see the search results.
the shorts tend to be so bad and pointless. occasionally there is someone who makes an effort, but the number of low effort and garbage ones made me stop looking at shorts ever.
I really like freetube on desktop, since I have liked the move towards less dependency on accounts. And freetube let’s me have a custom feed without needing an account.
And I love the built in sponsorblock and channel blocking feature too.
+1 for FreeTube. It’s so customizable. Besides the ad blocking and sponsor blocking by default, there are SO MANY features and interface improvements. Never going back.
I’ll be honest I didn’t even know you could log in to YouTube with it. I assumed most people would be using it to actively not participate. By using it you’re already taking ad revenue away and skipping sponsored segments.
I was looking at freetube as a potential solution, as at a quick glance, it seems to do most of the things I want. But honestly, I doubt it will be long before they start implementing systems to block such apps from being able to access YouTube content.
but i saw another article saying that adblocker usage dropped by like … meh i dunno 80% or some awful figure that I didn’t want to believe.
i’d rather live in the version of the world where this one is true, that nobody is installing adblockers, but i know better (sometimes) than to simply succumb to confirmation bias…
if youtube were smart though, it’d make ads less shitty, intrusive, and obnoxious.
If you read the article (or the comments), you’d know the title is misleading. People are uninstalling ad blockers because they’re installing better ones.
so the other article was akin to youtube celebrating that the car that ran them over stopped, without acknowledging that it only did so to shift into reverse and back over them again. heh.
I saw that one from Wired but didn’t post it because the body itself referenced increased installations of some adblockers. The title seemed like a strange conclusion to draw from it all.
I commented elsewhere, but the headline was referencing an 80% rise in uninstalls during the month, but the article itself revealed that there was a matching rise in installs during that same month. In other words it was people uninstalling their old adblockers and installing a new one, cycling through them to find one that worked.
Meanwhile, Youtube engineers and uBlock Origin volunteers are in a war of attrition, updating both the website (youtube, to block ublock) and uBlock Origin (the ad blocker, to unvlock the ublock blocker) multiple times a day every day
Oh, of course not. But uBlock Origin and pihole aren’t going anywhere. Hell, they’d probably have to get legislation to slow it down, but good luck fighting that battle. Hollywood’s war against piracy is a good comparison.
I’m scared that that’s the endgame here. By educating people about ad blockers, they might be purposely tanking their business model so they can cry to the government to ban ad blockers to save them.
Not even, they’ve already tried to make the case of Anti-adblock bypass violating DMCA and it hasn’t gone anywhere. Unlike piracy where it can and is claimed as a violation of copyright law.
Reminds me of the IM wars back in the latter 90s / early 00s. At one point, briefly, AIM and Trillian were pushing updates to negate each other every few hours.
Sponsor block is a different beast. Should we really be doing that to our content creators? No, definitely not. Is it them or the advertising company that suffers?
Edit: Actually really surprised about this. Couple weeks ago people are sticking up for YT premium prices. Now, you are against helping the creators you watch.
Agree. SponserBlock is just doing the clicking for me. I did the same thing manually for a long time as my regular youtoobers got sponsored. Good for them, but I don’t need to see it and they still got sponsored.
If you weren’t planning on paying for the product, the creator won’t take any hit from you using sponsorblock. In fact, the advertiser won’t either. Nobody will be hurt by it, because it was a massive waste of your time to start with.
Well, the blocker doesn’t stop me from seeing the ad, it stops me from wasting my time manually skipping the ad. I still don’t see how that’s going to change my mind about anything.
Also, if you were thinking of getting anything from a youtube ad: they are almost exclusively bad products. If you need something, just do a tiny bit of research instead of going with the first thing a content creator agreed to shill for.
It’s always some VPN making wild bullshit claims about what it can do for your privacy. I respect Tom Scott for refusing a VPN sponsorship because they wanted to make him lie.
He declined the first one, because they wanted him to lie.
He accepted the other, because they were fine with just facts.
A VPN doesn’t protect your privacy. It only helps on websites without working https, which is ridiculously rare these days. Yes, it also hides your IP address, but that is really really irrelevant. If you wanted to stay truly anonymous you’d not log in anywhere and use Tor. The only actual use case is circumventing geo blocking.
You can also circumvent geo blocking with a proxy, some of them are free, do not send any sensitive info on the free proxies however, not that a paid one is intrinsicaly safer, just like vpns.
My favorite aspect of sponsorblock is blocking the incredibly repetitive ubiquitous script that every single channel copies of like, subscribe, ring the notification bell.
This is actually why i don’t like it. Most of my subs do this kinda thing rarely but occasionally. Sponsorblock creates a gap in the video that is more jarring then the 1 second self promotion, wish there was an option to only block self promotions more then 4 seconds long.
I really can’t stand requests for likes, subscribes, notification bell at all. I actually hate it more than ads, and have backed out of many a video that didn’t happen to have the segment flagged at the beginning.
You can still use sponsorblock and configure it to not skipping sponsor segments if you want, and still enjoying the benefits of automatically skipping useless segments such as intro, outro, subscription reminders, self promotion, recaps, etc.
I used to let some creators through, but it seems like ad sponsors are locking down on creators to fit their message, so I’ve started blocking everything since it’s just useless mush.
You’re absolutely right. Sponsorblock directly harms the average people making content, it has nothing to do with Google.
It’s gross and reveals how much of the complaining about ads has absolutely nothing to do with privacy or malware or corporate profiteering or anything like that. These people are just nakedly selfish.
Wear those downvotes with pride. They mean you have a conscience and feel empathy.
Sponsors don't pay the creator less if you skip the sponsor segment. That's not tracked, at least not in a way that google will share with the creator or anyone else. If that changes someday, sure, you have a point. For now skipping the sponsor segment is as harmless as skipping through the commercials on TV.
Keyword here is for now. Just pushing them to be more intrusive. Yes they may incrementally become more intrusive in the future but it’s a decent trade-off for free content.
Cheers. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a response to a normal ethical take. We complain about wanting free and open source products but by the looks of it nobody is able to sit through a 20 second sponsor.
If we had everything on a free open source platform people would still skip the sponsored segment.
I feel if the sponsor blocks keep up we’ll start to see the creators or sponsors combat it in ways we really don’t like.
I watch YT about once a week and usually an hour or less. Premium isn’t worth it for that low of use. Sponsors, I skipped, always. I’ve never once purchased from a sponsor. I also skipped subscribe crap manually (I’m not logged in, I can’t).
SponsorBlock just does it for me, kinda nice. The creator gets paid by viewership so I have helped when I watch.
Lemmy isn’t seen by 98% of the public so my mentioning it hardly spreads further awareness. What did spread it was YT themselves cracking down. It made news headlines and my own mother asked I come over and install one.
YT Streisand Effected themselves. They demanded we not use them and got more people using them because of it.
Now, my mom won’t see Google ads anywhere, not just YT. What a smart move because I know there’s probably a million new UBlock users.
The content creators get paid the exact same whether I skip the sponsor segment or not. YouTube doesn't track that, or not in a way they share with anyone else at any rate. Sponsors aren't going to pay the content creators less due to skips since they literally cannot see who skips the segment.
In other words, it doesn't hurt the content creator in the slightest.
The other person’s been downvoted pretty heavily so I’ll volunteer to accept some.
Sponsorblock is a shitty tool for extremely selfish people that only hurts small-time content creators. You can’t argue about your data privacy, malware, corporate profits, or Google. Sponsorships are literally the least invasive and most direct form of financial support the average person can get for their content without you paying them directly. YouTubers do it because Google is already fucking them over. There’s absolutely no higher justification for it beyond annoyance at an extremely minor inconvenience and a sense of entitlement to the work of others.
You people would go to a little league baseball game and tear down the banner for Tom’s Auto Care if you could. Not every attempt at making money is evil.
You people would go to a little league baseball game and tear down the banner for Tom’s Auto Care if you could.
If someone came out and shoved the banner in my face and didn’t let me watch the game until several seconds had elapsed, yes, I’d tear the banner down too. Because it’s unacceptable.
But no one does that. The banner sits there in the outfield on the wall being unobtrusive and not interrupting the game or the flow of the game. That’s acceptable.
Make the ads unobtrusive and not interrupt the flow of the video and I don’t care. The problem is YT / YTers don’t do that. That’s why Sponser Block exists.
The creator isn’t losing money. They get paid to do the sponsorship. Skipping the segment has no effect on how much money they get because they already got it.
I only heard about AdNauseum because of this whole debacle. It blocks ads, hasn’t temporarily broken (as far as I have seen), and I set it to “click” 80% of all ads it sees.
I have probably screwed whatever profile they built on me, cost the ad buyers money bc clicks, hurt the conversion rate for purchases to cost google money, and even possibly made money for my favorite creators and sites (depending on how they’re paid).
Though someone lmk if I am misunderstanding something about it.
Holy crap, now that is causing massive damage to advertisers. I didn’t know this existed either. If everyone used it, the entire internet would collapse because most of it is for-profit now, unlike 30 years ago (when I made my first site in notepad).
These tech companies have underestimated their utility. They are mostly providing mindless time wasters. If you try to charge money or create inconvenience, people will look for something else to do.
Their attention is your lifeblood, and you’re actively giving them reasons to look elsewhere. The VC grow-at-all-costs business model is fundamentally flawed. It doesn’t scale when profitability becomes a priority.
Youtube produces almost none of their own content, instead they rely on other humans to create that content.
Use your ad blocker if you want, but stop treating youtubers as google employees (they’re not, they often have a much more frustrating relationship than you do) and start supporting them through other means.
To you, those people are just helping you waste your time. if that’s your real argument here, stop wasting your fucking time and do something else more worth your precious time, or start supporting content producers directly through non-youtube methods. Or just stop fucking watching.
Those people aren’t on youtube because they’re buying into corporate google dick-wrangling, they want to produce videos and have them get watched, and youtube is a place that hosts their videos for free AND gives them ad revenue share for hosting youtube ads.
You aren’t some hero for adblocking youtube but still watching it. google won’t notice your small dip in their revenue, but the youtuber who made it will.
Wanna support the people who entertain you (or, i guess, “waste your time”, if that’s what you consider entertainment to be — if all you want is to waste your time, don’t ads do the same thing for you?). Pay them directly for their content. Want to take a fake stand that supports nobody but yourself and your own inconveniences, install an ad blocker and boast on the internet about how you’re totally fucking over google and the people who create youtube content by doing so. But don’t treat yourself like some hero for doing so.
I was defending the people who produce content on youtube, and who do not enjoy the benefits of google’s wealth and market position, and are just trying to create their content.
adblock youtube if you want, but unless you’re also supporting the creators of your content outside of google, i have never paid google a dime either. don’t pretend this is about a big corporation. you just think you deserve to be entertained for free, regardless of who put in the effort to create it.
If you’re REALLY anti-google/youtube, STOP USING THEM. If you watch them with adblock, google can still spin your usage statistics into something that will appeal to investors, but youtube creators will be wondering why their numbers dwindle, because they don’t have investors to (lie to / spin numbers at). You’re still helping youtube, even with an adblocker.
On the other hand, if you support content creators outside of youtube? you are supporting them directly, without youtube’s involvement and without google even getting a cut. I do this for several youtubers, and support even more through merch and etc.
But sure keep telling me i’m defending the landlords because i’m getting mad at you for mistreating the staff and pretending you’re sticking it to the landlords.
To your point about watching YouTube with adblockers still helping Google due to viewership numbers. That’s exactly why after I stopped supporting blizzard (at first due to the blutzchung controversy, then everything else that happened) I immediately stopped playing hearthstone, yes, I was playing it free, I never spent any money on it, but I didn’t want to even indirectly help by giving them usage statistics, or by giving paying people even a little bit of a quicker matchmaking.
If content creators provide 90% or even 60% of value to YouTube, why is Google a trillion dollar company while major content creators are fighting for scraps that fall from their table? Why are content creators who aren’t in the top tier compensated so little for what they bring to the table?
YouTube is nothing without content. Unionize. Stand together and get paid what you’re worth.
where do i find the 10-40% percent of youtube-produced content on youtube you’re talking about?
Google is a trillion dollar company because they do far more than youtube, and make the majority of their money from taking a percentage of ad revenue. This does include youtube, and youtube is only profitable to google because they can sell ads on top of it, because video hosting on the internet is fucking expensive.
i pay google nothing, just like you. i do, however, support my favorite youtubers outside of google revenue streams with my own money, either through direct support or merchandise.
Both installing an adblocker and not even going to youtube will cost google money. I don’t care which you do. But if you do watch specific youtubers regularly, support them directly, even if you do use an ad blocker.
You’re not a hero for adblocking google. You’re a hero if you support content creators outside of google, whether or not you watch them on youtube using an adblocker.
The modern Internet community has an interestingly illogical take on free services. Either use them or pay for an alternative. But the average user has grown up on free services and will happily insist on having their cake and eating it too
Oh please. Youtubers make their money from direct sponsors they themselves advertise in their videos, from viewer sponsor platforms like patreon and from advertising their own product or services such as merchandise etc.
Their attention is your lifeblood, and you’re actively giving them reasons to look elsewhere.
👍
My attention is all the currency YouTube will ever get from me - and it should be enough. If I post videos to YouTube (for nothing in return) and I talk to people about videos I saw on YouTube or link them to videos - then I am a net gain for Google and they should treat me as such. If anything, they should be working (nicely) to try to get me to want to pay (or view ads) and just be thankful I’m there if I don’t pay (or view ads). Instead they’ve chosen to work at ensuring everyone is so goddamn pissed off at their bullshit that they’d rather make it their full-time job to never give them another dime. Good job, Google! Smart!
Edit: Oh look, half a dozen lectures about how Google has to make money somehow. Hi there YouTube shills, I thought I would see you here.
Look I hate YouTube ads too, and ads in general, but let’s say every user of a service is like you. Attention is all the currency they’ll ever get from you, that’s totally cool, absolutely. I’m totally that way too. But they’ve got to make money somehow, so if you’re not the paying customer, someone else has to be.
I’m not saying it has to be ad sales either, but if we want a world in which we can use services for free without ads, we need to come up with an alternative way for them to make money. It has to come from somewhere, and by the bucketload.
If every user thinks like you, then it doesn’t matter how many people you talk to or share links with, you’re not a net gain on their service, you bring nothing to it.
Why should they, or anybody, be thankful that you honour them with your presence, if you contribute nothing of value? What makes you so entitled to use somebody’s product for free with no strings attached?
Ads suck, I’m eager for us to move past them once we figure out an alternative that keeps products in business and us receiving things for free. But we can’t deny the reality we live in right now either. Even huge companies like Google (who yes, do suck) have to make money to survive.
I think generally you will find that people of this opinion hold that it is unreasonable that we have privatized basically all of the internet infrastructure. These people tend to be in favor of expecting the consumer spends more on hardware for hosting, and enthusiasts, hobbyists, non-profits, and occasionally companies develop the software necessary to make the internet function, rather than companies just paying for tons and tons of warehouses of servers, and then just forcing the software to all become fucked up walled gardens while the actual utilities everyone rests upon is left to rot.
Look I hate YouTube ads too, and ads in general, but let’s say every user of a service is like you.
I understand the message about needing to fund services to exist, but that stance I feel doesn’t always really work too well. Since if other users were like them then it’d also mean there might be a lot of stuff that doesn’t exist anymore which could be a pro like microtransactions ceasing to exist and move to subscription model failing.
And for YouTube might be completely different where depending on their taste maybe click baits turned people away if the person hated them, so those don’t exist. And long winded videos attempting to take advantage of the algorithm failed if they were someone who didn’t like videos that wasted their time, and everyone is like them.
Reddit might still support third party apps if everyone was like them, and lemmy bigger. That’s why if everyone was like them argument is just a weird one, since it turns minority actions into a majority and changes way too many things to focus on one singular thing.
But they have been, and for years. All the years I’ve run a smartphone Google has harvested and profited from my data. From Gmail to Chrome (before I switched) to Maps, etc - they have profited from people’s data at scale. So the argument that they need to make money somehow falls flat for me.
Also, if they charged like $2 a year to block ads, plenty of people would buy it. But like most things lately, the enshitification of our user experience continues. It’s not enough for companies like Google to “make money” - it’s never enough and their greed has no boundaries.
That’s why you see people like us pushing back - enough is enough.
Google doesn’t make money directly from harvesting your data, they make money from harvesting your data then showing you ads based on that data. So if you’re running an ad blocker then they aren’t making money from you (unless you pay them for stuff like subscriptions and apps). As ad blocking becomes more common they are definitely going to get more draconian to try to claw back that money (growth is infinite, profits must go up /s).
Also BTW Google probably makes more like $50 per user per year on average (looking at revenue and internet population) so they would never offer a $2/year ad block unless forced to by regulation.
To answer your questions - users such as this bring something more valuable than ad money. They bring data. Google harvests data and metrics on users in a million ways, packages this up, and sells it for considerably more than they make on ads. In free services such as this, YOU are the product.
Ads suck, nobody wants to watch them, and they simply represent google maximizing shareholder value at every opportunity, as they are legally bound to do under American capitalism. YouTube ads are not a critical revenue stream that will make or break them.
Copy-pasting this from a comment I made a few days ago. I’m so tired of this misconception. Google’s business model literally disincentivizes selling personal data. The business model is built on selling targeted advertisements. Google wants to keep this data to itself because it gives them a competitive advantage in the ad space.
Selling your data would give competitors power in the marketplace. So yes, Google collects data and uses it, but no, Google does not sell your data. It sells targeting BASED on your data.
Very different, regardless of if it is any better.
Not all interested buyers are in the ad business, and governments can make payments in a way that is difficult to audit from a third party perspective, definitely not in any currency or a change in the balance sheet. I wish things where different but seems to me that paying won’t protect me from them harvesting every bit they can.
YouTube creates no content and it’s reliant on people volunteering their time and talent to them. Fuck the idea that we need to pay google to access content they only host and don’t pay fairly for.
I will quite happily pay a reasonable price for the privilege of avoiding ads.
I understand why people block ads, even though they are a a free tier, even if I don’t agree with it.
The fact that the cost of YouTube Premium almost doubled overnight is making me rethink my ethics, when my current subscription is up for renewal, I will be reassessing whether to cease watching YouTube, watch YouTube with ads or determine another way of supporting content creators.
I pay for Premium now since it includes music streaming which is convenient to use. If they raise the price too much, I’ll absolutely just go back to mp3s and deal with the ads on YouTube and just watch less content on there. $15 is about my cap before I do that.
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