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YouTube's next move might make it virtually impossible to block ads
(www.androidpolice.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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Good. This is how YouTube dies. This is how Google dies. This is how competitors/alternatives are born. Stop fighting to make Google services useable against every effort of theirs. Let them drive people away to make (or discover) alternatives.
Do you have any idea how many billions with a B it would take to even start a viable, proper competitor to youtube? and how quickly that capital B could end up becoming a Capital T?
I hate people who keep screaming about let youtube die and alternatives will be born.
Youtube has been shit for years. No ones made an alternative that is viable.
Any an all alternatives are subscription based services, and tiny. Like Floatplane, Utreon and whatever the gunfocused one is that I cant remember off the top of my head, if it even still exists.
Anyone that has that kinda money are probably already in bed with googles capitalistic hellscape ideals for hte internet and not interested in going against them.
Creating competitors for things like Reddit and Facebook are relatively easy. Creating a competitor for something that probably accumulates hundreds of terabytes, if not more, per hour? That takes insane amounts of storage, and bandwidth, and overhead, and everything else that costs more than any regular person could ever have a hope of even having a wet dream over.
Notpornhub
Users spend hours on YT, and 30 secs on PH. They'd have to scale their infrastructure up massively.
Look at this guy and his whole 30s
If you tried to create a centralized one? Yeah, it would take a lot. Would a decentralized one be as expensive? I'm not sure.
I think the best goal would be to try to create a platform for creators that has a low barrier to entry - both in terms of cost and skill - that gives them the ability to easily and quickly set up a "channel" to "broadcast" from and earn some revenue somehow.
Why build one competitor to YouTube when we could build a billion of them?
Because thats the very reason why people hate current streaming services, and you're arguing to not only make it worse than that, but to make the end users eat the costs of storage and bandwidth.
If they shared the same protocol, or at least reasonably compatible versions of it, you could have one app that does all of them.
The protocol isn't the hard part. It's the monetizing that is. Creators aren't looking to provide content for free, especially if they are also now paying for hosting costs.
Ad spots (like Google does) work well because they can inject an up to date ad into an old video. In something like the fedeverse today a creators only option would be ads baked into the video, but they would only get paid for that up front which isn't ideal...
Sponsors pay much more than views. So does patrons.
The true issue is discoverability in my opinion.
Sponsors pay more upfront. If creators are only using sponsors than their whole back catalogue is basically valueless. If it costs a creator 2-10 cents a month to host a video (based off S3 pricing), but they only made 1000$ on it upfront when the video was made, overtime the back catalogue becomes a pretty significant financial burden if it's not being monetized
Also it's worth keeping in mind that many people are also using tools to autoskip sponsor spots, and the only leverage creators have for being paid by sponsors are viewership numbers.
Patreon is irrelevant, that's just like Nebula, floatplane etc, it's essentially a subscription based alternative to YouTube.
Discoverability is pointless if the people discovering you aren't going to financial contribute. It's the age old "why don't you work for me for free, the exposure I provide will make it worth your time", that hasn't been true before and likely isn't here. Creators aren't looking to work for free (at least not the ones creating the high quality content we're used to today)
Boy howdy, users sure would love to pivot to a peer distributed content system that randomly downloads chunks of a video file as they become available with speeds of anywhere between 2 bytes and 2 megabytes a second (which one you'll get depends on who you're getting the chunks from) with literally no guarantee of being able to even complete said download because the people they're downloading it from may not all have the entire file's worth of combined data across their respective computers, and they have to download the entire video before watching it to determine whether or not they even want to watch it in the first place. Also, there's no capacity for monetization without literally doing what Google is trying to do and injecting advertisements directly into the video, so there's no incentive for any content producers to use this system to distribute said content, meaning it would be a ghost town of a service from the start.
Yep, that would be a great system. /s
Exactly.
I'm feeling like this whole "distrubuted youtube!" argument is nothing but a variant of the blockchain fantasy. Seeing a lot of the same style of arguments and ignorance.
It’s a common trap for certain types of people to assume technology can fix problems that are inventive or socially driven.
Its also a common trap for idiots to grasp hold of a fraction of a fragment of an idea and think it gives them complete and total understanding, and then go around proselytizing their absolute incompetence as if its techno-gospel.
Which I think is why this distributed youtube bull follows the same general argument trend as the mythical and holy blockchain. That does nothing, but somehow can magically solve all problems.
A service people want to use is typically one with redundancy and high availability. Your laptop could overheat, have a drive failure, spontaneously lose its wifi connection, or a million other things. It's fundamentally unreliable.
Scalability isn't just about distribution. It's about reliability and convenience - two things your system as described lacks by design. A video file that no one but you has ever seen has the same exact degree of accessibility as one served to millions.
This is the copium talking. If it had been easy to do and monetizable, it would have already been done. That's the other part of the problem here. There is no incentive for anyone to use this system to consume or distribute content other than to decouple from Google. Opposition to an existing service is not enough of a motivator for people to use a system. It has to provide some comparative benefit that outweighs the cost incurred by continuing to use the other service. The big thing that Youtube has is, obviously, content. Exabytes of it. Your new service would have...nothing. We have left the age of services starting up and gaining massive movements of people behind them. We are now in an age of the internet in which the inertia of existing services will carry them decades into the future. Youtube is now too big to fail, and too big to be replaced.
Blockbuster died because its business model was rendered obsolete by virtue of widespread adoption of the internet and the advent of streaming. And because it refused to shift its business model away from physical media distribution to digital. Let me know when they invent something that makes the internet obsolete, will you? Because that is what it will take to dethrone YouTube.
I think YouTube will eventually end up destroying itself. It's not a profitable business model to just run some ads. The amount of storage, bandwidth, and processing power a video host requires is massive.
To be fair, a LOT of people swear by Popcorn Time, which is exactly that. I was surprised it worked as well as it does, too.
Your laptop would become suicidal the second it had to start serving streaming, 4k video to dozens of people, much less hundreds or thousands.
I hate the cloud you perfidious incompetent. The only thing more stupid than the "cloud" is your belief that you can serve hundreds, if not thousands, of simultaneous streams,possibly 1080, most likely 4k, from your 15mbps laptop.
You must not want a youtube competitor then, if your goal is to just okay-ly stream to just a couple dozen or so people.
It has been THE viteo platform for literally decades. There is so much content there; it would be a tremendous effort to direct that elsewhere.
And that other site would quickly succumb to storage and bandwidth costs. What options could exist?
The only option left would be PeerTube if it federated with every other PeerTube instance by default, like Lemmy
Wishfull thinking. Sadly the truth.
It's nearly impossible to have that high of a federation and preventing a centralization to not loose any videos (except if the creators chose so).
damn
Nebula is interesting. You pay for a subscription, which funds creators and platform costs.
So... YouTube Premium.
Yup, but no Google tracking, but they seem to do other tracking.
Sounds like a survivable approach. Except: has anyone heard of it? I hadn't.
It’s owned and populated by history and science/engineering YouTubers, so if you’re not usually watching that side of YouTube, you might not find much on Nebula for you.
On the flipside, that's most of what I watch, so I hear about it all the time.
Same for Floatplane
Sure, use anything that's not Youtube.
I fail to follow how a competitor can pop up if the main users it's attracting are ones that don't want to view ads or pay for subscriptions.
The alternative should be libraries hosting the peoples internet.
You may balk at the idea, much like you would have at the idea of free public libraries when originally conceived.
I like this idea so much. Do the public libraries not have some kind of video service already? Seems like a network of library-powered PeerTube instances would serve that niche really well.
How can a competitor that is courting people that aren’t revenue sources compete
I like youtube, i use it quite a lot. I wouldn't use it at all without ad and sponsor block. I don't know how so many people do it, it's crazy to me.