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YouTube cracking on ad blockers.
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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Man y'all really expect high quality, extremely diverse, and robust video streaming platform for free?!
YouTube gotta pay it's bills somehow. Why y'all ok with paying Netflix/prime/hulu or whatever but not YouTube?!
YouTube don't owe nobody free services. Get over it.
It’s google. They’re paying their bills just fine
Awww, poor little YouTube/Google/Alphabet, helpless and basically living on the streets, barely able to make ends meet.
literally laughs my fucking ass off
If it is so dire for the poor conglomerate, it could shutdown YouTube to cut costs.
crickets
That's what I thought.
Won't somebody please think of the CEO!? Spare a thought for the investment portfolio!
People are generally okay with some ads. It's the quantity and aggressiveness and propensity for making the content worse by how they inject them into the videos that people don't like. Yes, their infrastructure costs money to run. But their service is only possible because of the people who make videos for them and the people who watch them. It's always been a give and take relationship. They've just been gradually deciding over the years to take more and more as their monopoly over a certain category of digital media has solidified and people have responded in the way people always do.
The entitlement around here and on Reddit is insane. Just stop using the service if the ads are too much. Or pay for the subscription
They knew what they were getting into when they acquired yt - or at least they should have known. I was a teen when yt started and even I could see how much of a money pit it would be. If G wants to throw wads of cash at it, fine. But I'm not propping up their fiscally-failed project with my own money.
You try to bait others into your poorly-crafted arguments when the core statement is stupid: there is no way yt would or will be profitable, full stop. That's it. And G waited way, way too long to try and monitize or start a subscription model, and now they have a sea of users who will not pay because 'it's always been free'. Through and through G fucked themselves with yt. They only have themselves to blame for the situation they now find themselves in.
Corporate apologia 🙄
Do you work for free yourself? Is it completely unreasonable to expect money in return for your services?
Except Google is double dipping, making money off of your data while charging for the "privilege". Fuck all that
Agreed. However I still can't make a good faith argument as to why YouTube should be free. I too prefer not to pay but I never expected that to last forever and we've had a good run. I basically got a 15 year free trial and now they want me to pay for it - fair enough (I don't yet thought)
JW do you know how much money google actually makes off of your data?
I tried searching it and didn't find anything.
"Selling my data should be enough money to cover video bandwidth" is a common argument in this thread and was wondering if anyone actually had numbers to back that up.
Do the Google engineers work for free?
Yep. That's why I also pay for it. It's a reasonable price for a valued service. Moaners gotta moan.
they get all content for free though, unlike netflix etc.
They also pay content creators, so perhaps you will need to drill into a bit more detail instead of offering a factually inaccurate single-line reply.
They pay some creators a pittance, and can revoke that amount and/or ability at any time, for any reason, even for reasons which are not listed in their terms, are factually inaccurate, or otherwise allows them to fuck the creator. Yt is like the waitstaff in the US, "yeah we pay them" ($3 an hour and the rest has to come from elsewhere to make ends meet).
Call me when you see a 90 second sponsor segment for SquareSpace in your next Netflix show.
The vast majority of content uploaded is never going to make them any money. They get free content but hosting it is incredibly expensive.
Vast majority of content won't fucking lose them money either, you hairless ape. They show ads even on unmonetizable content, i.e. they're using voluntary labor to make money.
Boo fuckin hoo. The poor multi billion dollar corporation, what will they ever do?
I am so tired of seeing this argument. I do not care about ads. That is not the problem. The problem is that YouTube thinks it is entitled to suck up every little bit of information about me and everyone within speaking distance of me just because I use their service. Do you want to run ads? Go for it. Do you want to get a little bit of basic information about your audience? Such as State or city? Honestly, that is fine. We need to establish a line, but I am not wholesale against any sort of information coming in. But that is not what they are doing. They give us these opaque TOS’s that allow them to take so much information and even sell it to third parties. It is out of control and we have no sense of what our data is worth or who is getting it. That is not OK.
If you want to do an on air read, I’m not going to skip it. If YouTube to run the occasional ad, I’ll watch it. But I will never, ever take down my VPN and ublock origin. I will never apologize for obfuscating my data a little bit. That is my right, and I will exercise it every time.
There is also one other very simple problem with this argument: you don’t have to run ads and steal all my data in order to make money. There are tons of other revenue models out there.
The ads are just out of control. Back when it was one, maybe two, ads that were 10-20s long combined, I was willing to sit through it. Now there are almost always multiple ads concurrent, ads in the middle of the video, ads at the end of the video if it plays all thr way through, then ads again before the next video plays.
Bring it back to a single ad at the beginning of the video and give me a variety of ads so it isn't the same 3 over and over, and I'll sit and watch it.
That's the way greed creeps.
You could build a successful service that brought in $1 million a month from happy users treated ethically, but there will always be an insatiable psycopath whispering "if we sold our user data, we could make a extra $100k each month".
So one ad becomes two. Users are tracked and the information sold. Algorithms are created to make services as addictive as possible, because "one more video" turns into "4 more ads".
However many apologists may post about poor, destitute Google being unable to feed their children because people aren't watching enough ads, we're absolutely correct to oppose that endless creeping.
There is always another sleazy way to manipulate people out of money. Companies need to learn to accept that their tens of millions of dollars profit are enough.
you watched a short video, now bend over and take it so daddy google can get another bonus, you entitled slut 🥵🥵
Cry us a river. I will find ways to block ads and tell people how to do it
I wouldn't object to paying if:
This. I used to pay for ytp family plan, way back when now. I had to skip a month as money was that tight. When I went to resub, they wanted an extra ~$5 a month, or like 25%, for the same content and features. No advertised changes in revenue sharing amounts.
I just pay creators directly now, via patreon and ko-fi. I don't care about yt, I care about a few creators. A few have stated that $1 is more than they make from yt per user per month. The revenue split is wild.
I don't care about ytm. Cut the cost in half and give more to the people that are actually providing content. Right now yt in my eyes is greedy and their additional price hikes solidify that.
I think the price is very fair if you split the family plan with others
Also I think creators get a 55% cut for ad revenue which seems reasonable to me
You're joking, right? Creators make the whole video, Youtube only has to serve it. Also, not all creators get money from ads, so Youtube gets to STEAL from the little guys.
You realize that serving the video is incredibly expensive right? There’s a reason Lemmy doesn’t support video hosting
They also pay for hosting the thousands of videos from "little guys" that no one will watch
Difference is those other networks actually make content thats arguably seen as worth paying for. YouTube recycles user content and barely pays those users for it. Yes you can say that they deserve your money for servers and whatnot, but you can’t compare YouTube with those other services you mentioned and expect people to cry big crocodile tears…
They're not recycling anything though. They're hosting it. For 90% of therm they're not even charging the person to host it.
That's only possible because of ads, because it's not out of the kindness of their hearts. If there was not just value but negative value in Youtube, they would just shut Youtube down. Yeah, they make a lot more money than they need to maintain youtube. But they'd probably prefer to put that money towards the things actually making them money.
And yeah, it would be nice if some site existed that wasn't corporate driven, but most of them either have no content, or are just siphoning off of Youtube's content anyway.
And yes, you can say Youtube's (users) content, and it virtually makes no difference in the grand scheme of things. Hosting the content is still required to do.
Ads aren't the only form of revenue for them, and historically, YouTube had been run at a loss for years.
...That...doesn't bode well when they already have an alternative revenue option. It sounds like the adblock is hurting their revenue, and the alternative options aren't making it up.
Like that doesn't sound like they have a good reason to stop trying.
not 90%, 100%. there are no hosting fees on YouTube for anyone. I could see being able to upload content requiring a subscription in future though
People out here are really dick riding YouTube lmao.
Most importantly they are simping for Google and acting as though YouTube is an independent company with its own separate stocks and unaffiliated under the Google monolith.
They’re one of the largest companies in world: they are the bills
I dont use those particular other services to be fair. I do admittedly pay for Nebula, but to my understanding that is supposed to be more creator driven and is quite cheap anyway.
The thing about YouTube adblocking, at least for me, is that I dont think they owe me free and ad free content, or that they should be obligated to offer that for some reason. I fully understand that delivering video the way they do costs some amount of money even if not very much for an individual user, so blocking their monetization scheme means that using their website costs them money. However, I do not like or respect that company, I feel that their engagement algorithms have proven generally harmful to society as a whole by pushing people to more extreme content to improve retention, and I feel that their position as the primary place anyone thinks of to upload or view video not created by large scale studios is non-ideal. As such, when I do end up watching something there (content which, I might add, isnt even something that they create, just stuff independent creators are pretty much forced to upload there to be relevant as they are by far the largest game in town for their niche), I'm not bothered by blocking their ads, because I dont really care about Youtube's profit margin. If anything, if doing so actually harms them, in some tiny way, that is a bonus in my book.
YouTube is highly profitable already.
Poor Google. Such a small company struggling to get by.
Meh if YouTube died tomorrow there would be a competitor the next day. Google bought YouTube back in the day and there are already like platforms.
How much of their revenue is spent toward content generation?
I know but ... YouTube belongs to YouTube, and I'm sure google is already making tons of money selling/using the data of all their users so... I would not have a problem with one or two ads, but they often put three or more annoying ads per video.