YouTube will now show ads on all videos even if creators don’t want them(forbes.com)
forbes.com
YouTube will now show ads on all videos even if creators don’t want them
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/11/18/youtube-will-now-show-ads-on-all-videos-even-if-creators-dont-want-them/
782 comments
This sounds like a pretty straightforward cause & effect here. Creators went for direct monetization outside of youtube instead of ads, and youtube responded by keeping their net income the same by just showing ads anyway.
> But at the same time, there are people who have so heavily invested into the YouTube ecosystem with certain expectations for a very long time, and pretty much have their entire business on there, so they can't very easily take their business elsewhere if they're unhappy with the change.
A key part of running a business is risk management & mitigation. YouTube has very obviously been an ad-supported video platform for at least a decade. Hoping nothing changes about your little ad-free corner of that platform is not a sound business plan.
It's shitty that Google didn't give a heads up, but anyone whose business is riding on this should definitely have been expecting something like this and had a backup plan. Literally free content hosting is obviously not a thing that will exist for very long. Enjoy it while it lasts, but you know also have a Vimeo account ready to go as well or something like that.
> But at the same time, there are people who have so heavily invested into the YouTube ecosystem with certain expectations for a very long time, and pretty much have their entire business on there, so they can't very easily take their business elsewhere if they're unhappy with the change.
A key part of running a business is risk management & mitigation. YouTube has very obviously been an ad-supported video platform for at least a decade. Hoping nothing changes about your little ad-free corner of that platform is not a sound business plan.
It's shitty that Google didn't give a heads up, but anyone whose business is riding on this should definitely have been expecting something like this and had a backup plan. Literally free content hosting is obviously not a thing that will exist for very long. Enjoy it while it lasts, but you know also have a Vimeo account ready to go as well or something like that.
"Creators" went for direct monetisation because de-monetisation can happen on youtube for almost any arbitrary reason and there is almost no way to contact a human (as far as I am aware) to remedy such a situation.
Yeah, and I think this drives the point home even further. You really want a risk mitigation strategy for YouTube's hostile actions against creators. It's been a slow but steady creep. So, if your business is built off the back of something like Facebook, or YouTube, or Instagram, you probably want a backup plan.
I've seen a few YouTubers have a centralized site for signups and support where they host all their content. While the YT revenue is important, they at least have a way to engage their consumers should something terrible happen. This is BCP in a nutshell.
I've seen a few YouTubers have a centralized site for signups and support where they host all their content. While the YT revenue is important, they at least have a way to engage their consumers should something terrible happen. This is BCP in a nutshell.
Linus of the Tech Tips variety has said that a major reason they kept paying for the forums, which are a pain to keep healthy & don't generate much revenue, is so that they could have a direct line of communication to their core fan base no matter what happens.
Similarly there's a reason LTT launched Floatplane. Risk management is important regardless of how big your business is. Even if you're large enough for youtube to assign you an actual person for support.
Similarly there's a reason LTT launched Floatplane. Risk management is important regardless of how big your business is. Even if you're large enough for youtube to assign you an actual person for support.
Couldn’t they just use Twitter or some other platform like everyone else?
If they used Twitter or some other platform then they are still reliant on an externally funded system they have no control over. It's not really a backup plan at that point.
Also I don't think you can build a community on Twitter anyway. It's just shouting into the void. They could use it for announcements (and do, LTT is on Twitter, too), but little else.
Also I don't think you can build a community on Twitter anyway. It's just shouting into the void. They could use it for announcements (and do, LTT is on Twitter, too), but little else.
> Linus of the Tech Tips variety has said that a major reason they kept paying for the forums ... is so that they could have a direct line of communication to their core fan base no matter what happens.
Using it for announcements is precisely the primary reason they claimed to want to keep the forums. So in this case, Twitter would be appropriate.
Using it for announcements is precisely the primary reason they claimed to want to keep the forums. So in this case, Twitter would be appropriate.
On twitter communication only happens here in now. Nobody (almost) cares about tweets older than 3 days, and twitter UI "helps" with that.
> Linus of the Tech Tips variety has said that a major reason they kept paying for the forums ... is so that they could have a direct line of communication to their core fan base no matter what happens.
Using it for announcements is precisely the primary reason they claimed to want to keep the forums. So in this case, having an archive of old posts really doesn't have much of a purpose.
Twitter and Google and Facebook often cut a person at the same time. So it's like backuping up your photos to another drive on the same computer. Better than nothing but not ideal.
Can creators self-host videos on their personal website and push that video to Youtube for their subscribers? That way, they can direct users who don't want ads to their website. Then they are not completely dependent on YT, FB, etc.
Self-hosting video content is either not very simple, or not very featureful.
You can put an html video tag and call it a day, but you'll be missing out on using the best codec for each viewer and bandwidth adaptation and (last I looked, hopefully I'm wrong) usable UI.
Bandwidth is an issue, although I've seen enough high bandwidth, unmetered server offers that I think it might work. Depending on where your viewers are and where you find cheap bandwidth, you might get poor performance just from distance, whereas YouTube and Facebook have CDNs with nodes everywhere.
You can put an html video tag and call it a day, but you'll be missing out on using the best codec for each viewer and bandwidth adaptation and (last I looked, hopefully I'm wrong) usable UI.
Bandwidth is an issue, although I've seen enough high bandwidth, unmetered server offers that I think it might work. Depending on where your viewers are and where you find cheap bandwidth, you might get poor performance just from distance, whereas YouTube and Facebook have CDNs with nodes everywhere.
Meanwhile there is nothing that matches the efficiency of torrents. I got some nice feedback from putting a magnet under the embed. People said: 1) I wanted to keep the video. 2) I seed it to support it as an upvote. 3) My computer is to shit to play embedded videos. 4) I bookmark your videos (and website) in my torrent client.
A seriously crappy PC, poor bandwidth an some noisy old disks is enough to host 5 TB+
A seriously crappy PC, poor bandwidth an some noisy old disks is enough to host 5 TB+
If you even have a few thousand people regularly watching you (whcih is common these days). The bandwidth costs start to add up.
Bandwidth is the easy part for most cases. The software/operations requirements and the network effects are huge and crushing.
Not really. Good dedicated servers come with multiple TB free = 1000x 1 GB stream. And usually it's only pennies afterwards.
I've got experience for US hosting and they dont have great package prices like you're describing after the initial cap ime. 20 TB as some of the biggest caps then your bill is nearly doubled for 20 more. After that your bill would skyrocket to >$1000 in the increased networking fees and you dont even want to know how much unmetered 1+Gbps will get you. This will vary of course because short of being a hosting or tech company of size its not worth the cost, paperwork, biometrics, and time it takes.
So you go for a reseller which there are many stellar ones but they'll either utilize a program with the datacenter akin to an reseller affiliate program with them being the 3rd party support or do it all themselves. If they do the reseller affiliate program they cant really offer anything outside of theie markups on the existing offerings by the datacenter. If they do it all themselves then it becomes much more expensive for the upfront costs.
What you want is a VPS and a CDN which provides a better experience and what every streaming platform uses. Not that expensive either!
So you go for a reseller which there are many stellar ones but they'll either utilize a program with the datacenter akin to an reseller affiliate program with them being the 3rd party support or do it all themselves. If they do the reseller affiliate program they cant really offer anything outside of theie markups on the existing offerings by the datacenter. If they do it all themselves then it becomes much more expensive for the upfront costs.
What you want is a VPS and a CDN which provides a better experience and what every streaming platform uses. Not that expensive either!
Without a CDN, the streaming experience is going to suck for anyone outside of the geographic proximity of your dedicated server
Where? Most place seem to get quite expensive once you add a Object Storage on top.
Hetzner $50+ servers have 1gbps uplink with unmetered BW.
That means the link can support less than 100 viewers at once on a video with 10 Mbps bitrate. Often a large portion of views comes in the first few days of a video being posted. You could probably handle the spike of views from a video that receives a couple of thousand views total (maybe even 10k), but more than that seems difficult.
Also, is Hetzner actually unmetered or do they claim they are with an asterisk?
Also, is Hetzner actually unmetered or do they claim they are with an asterisk?
replying to Aerroon but it was too deep so replying here.
Is there a way to do it with some p2p à la popcorntime?
Then if there was a surge, the peers could absorb some of it.
Does peertube do that?
Is there a way to do it with some p2p à la popcorntime?
Then if there was a surge, the peers could absorb some of it.
Does peertube do that?
Peertube do exactly this. Webtorrent support it's main feature so you dont actually need powerful server for spikes in popularity.
Thanks I will take a look.
excellent compromise!
other replies mention the client compatibility, quality and bandwidth issues with self hosting but i think this can be reasonably adressed with just going for a common denominator on the self-hosting side (eg. 720p h264)
other replies mention the client compatibility, quality and bandwidth issues with self hosting but i think this can be reasonably adressed with just going for a common denominator on the self-hosting side (eg. 720p h264)
So how does this work for content that they decide to demonetize? Does Google just run ads and take the money now?
I don't know. They have already had "not advertiser friendly" caveat which is a way of just disqualifying anyone they like.
There has been several moral panics incited by the conventional media (TV, newspapers etc) about adverts being displayed alongside edgy content a while back. Several rounds of this eventually brought about a TOS change where they could deem you "not advertiser friendly". This of course ignored that Google does targeted advertising.
Some claim it is "political" however I believe it is simpler than that. It gave youtube an excuse to stop paying people without outright removing them from the platform which saves them a fair bit of money and doesn't quite bring the same outrage from the respective fanbases as outright removing people. In addition to that the people that have been demonetised have ranged from progressives, anarcho-communists, people doing ben-shapiro compilation videos and edgy boys and girls that tend to shitpost. So I don't see anything political about it.
They've also made it harder to be monetised on the platform generally, IIRC you can't be monetised at all and cannot receive super chats if you have less than 1000 subscribers. You also can't put custom thumbnails on your videos which makes it harder for your content to get attention.
There has been several moral panics incited by the conventional media (TV, newspapers etc) about adverts being displayed alongside edgy content a while back. Several rounds of this eventually brought about a TOS change where they could deem you "not advertiser friendly". This of course ignored that Google does targeted advertising.
Some claim it is "political" however I believe it is simpler than that. It gave youtube an excuse to stop paying people without outright removing them from the platform which saves them a fair bit of money and doesn't quite bring the same outrage from the respective fanbases as outright removing people. In addition to that the people that have been demonetised have ranged from progressives, anarcho-communists, people doing ben-shapiro compilation videos and edgy boys and girls that tend to shitpost. So I don't see anything political about it.
They've also made it harder to be monetised on the platform generally, IIRC you can't be monetised at all and cannot receive super chats if you have less than 1000 subscribers. You also can't put custom thumbnails on your videos which makes it harder for your content to get attention.
> Creators went for direct monetization outside of youtube instead of ads, and youtube responded by keeping their net income the same by just showing ads anyway.
It's more complicated than that. Small time creators or others ineligible for the Youtube "partner program" have no choice but to monetize outside of Youtube. With this change, the only way you as a creator can choose whether ads appear on your video is to make partner.
The scummy thing here is that Youtube has made it harder and harder for creators to become eligible to monetize their channels, and now they're swooping in to take 100% of the ad revenue on those small-time channels.
It's more complicated than that. Small time creators or others ineligible for the Youtube "partner program" have no choice but to monetize outside of Youtube. With this change, the only way you as a creator can choose whether ads appear on your video is to make partner.
The scummy thing here is that Youtube has made it harder and harder for creators to become eligible to monetize their channels, and now they're swooping in to take 100% of the ad revenue on those small-time channels.
Being eligible to monetize doesn't look that intimidating? https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72851?hl=en
Not sure how many small creators both can't manage that but can manage external monetization?
Not sure how many small creators both can't manage that but can manage external monetization?
1000 subscribers?
You can sign up and make more money from 3 patreons than 1000 yt subscribers, what are you on about?
That depends on the amount of content you post. 1000 people watching a reasonable length video might only be $1-2 per video, but 10-15 videos a month would be $10-30. That can be more than 3 patrons.
Yeah - but you dont need to post weekly content with patreons, you can get by with monthly given the subscription, and tbqh you can probably do bi-monthly with many types of subscribers - supporting instead of expecting content.
Also with 1000 subscribers you dont guarantee 1000 views, just potential views.
Also with 1000 subscribers you dont guarantee 1000 views, just potential views.
Most people I know using Patreon post weekly, with maybe 2-3 posts a week. That includes 2nd-tier content like WIP and polls. Patreon requires a substantially smaller commitment, but it's more difficult to find patrons than viewers.
Even YouTube made $3 billion in non-advertising revenue last year which includes subscriptions. The ad business brought in $15 billion revenue.
I agree with most of what you're saying, but I worry that Youtube's effective monopoly means that there just aren't other hosting platforms with the same kind of user base and discoverability.
Perhaps their current pricing model is fair, I have no idea. But being the de facto video hosting site gives them tons of power. They have the ability to extract extra value out of their users---much more than a non-monopolized market would allow.
Perhaps their current pricing model is fair, I have no idea. But being the de facto video hosting site gives them tons of power. They have the ability to extract extra value out of their users---much more than a non-monopolized market would allow.
I'd agree if and only if this was some drastic shift in policy, but it really isn't. The headline here is basically ad-supported platform shows ads. Ads have been super common on YouTube for years and years, so this isn't really a big change in overall expectations & experience. It's not an ad-free platform goes ad-supported situation where it was subsidized to kill off others before showing ads. More a small loophole was closed, and only if you were large enough to even have the loophole available to you in the first place.
I think what we're saying is compatible. Youtube isn't really doing anything new, just putting out more ads. They're able get away with it because they have a monopoly.
In my opinion, they don't really have a monopoly. They have plenty of competitors. In fact, the largest user generated video servers are under facebook control.
They didn't do it because they had a monopoly, they don't have a monopoly. It was more base than that. They did it because they wanted more money. Which is their right. I'm not complaining, but everyone's putting forth a great deal of high tone reasoning fro something that really is base venality at its root. They want more money. They believe they can get it even though they are not a monopoly. Even though Facebook is bigger. And even though their users will get mad.
They didn't do it because they had a monopoly, they don't have a monopoly. It was more base than that. They did it because they wanted more money. Which is their right. I'm not complaining, but everyone's putting forth a great deal of high tone reasoning fro something that really is base venality at its root. They want more money. They believe they can get it even though they are not a monopoly. Even though Facebook is bigger. And even though their users will get mad.
You're totally right, they want more money. I agree they don't have a perfect monopoly either. There are lots of other options.
The reality is, most of their customers aren't going anywhere. Consider all the times you use Youtube. Trying to find a music video, watching sports highlights, videos from your favourite creators. Can you switch to DailyMotion for all of that now? Are all of your creators posting their videos on Facebook? Even if they are, are the videos as easy to find and discover as they are on Youtube? For content creators, is there anywhere else they can share and expect to find the same kind of audience? Not really.
This is what I'm talking about when I say monopoly. It's true, there's other options. A creator can post their videos on Vimeo and host their own website to monetize, just like someone could have taken a horse and buggy instead of the new railroad. No one is forced to go by train, but doing it the old way is inefficient and expensive. n both cases they won't get the same bang for their buck.
The reality is, most of their customers aren't going anywhere. Consider all the times you use Youtube. Trying to find a music video, watching sports highlights, videos from your favourite creators. Can you switch to DailyMotion for all of that now? Are all of your creators posting their videos on Facebook? Even if they are, are the videos as easy to find and discover as they are on Youtube? For content creators, is there anywhere else they can share and expect to find the same kind of audience? Not really.
This is what I'm talking about when I say monopoly. It's true, there's other options. A creator can post their videos on Vimeo and host their own website to monetize, just like someone could have taken a horse and buggy instead of the new railroad. No one is forced to go by train, but doing it the old way is inefficient and expensive. n both cases they won't get the same bang for their buck.
You yourself admit that Youtube is a platform that provides you with great user base and discoverability. That's also the exact reason what every other platform uses to charge 30% (Steam, Apple Store, etc). So why is it expected here for Youtube to give away all that for free, and allow you to completely turn off all the ads making them zero dollar, while you are having your content hosted for free and making money externally?
You're right, they shouldn't give all of that away for free. They deserve to make money for their service. I don't really have an opinion on the business model, or whether it's right or wrong to force ads on all videos.
I just become worried when they use their monopoly to extract as much value as possible, far beyond what they need to sustain their profits. I think monopolies are bad in principle, and Youtube is another example, just like Microsoft was, cable companies are, telecom was, railroads were, etc.
I just become worried when they use their monopoly to extract as much value as possible, far beyond what they need to sustain their profits. I think monopolies are bad in principle, and Youtube is another example, just like Microsoft was, cable companies are, telecom was, railroads were, etc.
> I just become worried when they use their monopoly to extract as much value as possible, far beyond what they need to sustain their profits
But I'm not sure that's clear. There's been a distinct increase in the number of in-video ads (Raycon, Skillshare, ExpressVPN, Squarespace, Curiosity Stream, and so on), which probably corresponds to a distinct decrease in Youtube enabled ads. So with that logic, Youtube is probably making less money from top creators, who have been skipping the middleman entirely. This seems more like a step to retaining existing profits instead of increasing them.
But I'm not sure that's clear. There's been a distinct increase in the number of in-video ads (Raycon, Skillshare, ExpressVPN, Squarespace, Curiosity Stream, and so on), which probably corresponds to a distinct decrease in Youtube enabled ads. So with that logic, Youtube is probably making less money from top creators, who have been skipping the middleman entirely. This seems more like a step to retaining existing profits instead of increasing them.
Creators not only moved their ads out, many have been using and advertising other platforms for a while now. Dropout.tv, floatplane, nebula, patreon, etc. have been getting ad-free, paid users for lower price than the current yt.
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> it's kind of a shitty move by Google.
It's kind of business as usual for Google. Why would anyone expect them to be kind and generous suddenly when they have consistently for years pulled the rug out underneath previosly-free services. (or killed them off completely https://killedbygoogle.com/ )
gmail subscriptions are next, just wait and see.
It's kind of business as usual for Google. Why would anyone expect them to be kind and generous suddenly when they have consistently for years pulled the rug out underneath previosly-free services. (or killed them off completely https://killedbygoogle.com/ )
gmail subscriptions are next, just wait and see.
That's probably the one service that will always be "free" since it's such a gold mine of your personal info
I wouldn't be entirely sure about gmail...
But search is the thing that is essentially free advertising space for them. So it's likely to stay free...
But search is the thing that is essentially free advertising space for them. So it's likely to stay free...
Neither of these are free services. You are the product
I have free grandfathered Google Business Plan, including Gmail, but on my domain. The moment Google decides that I have to pay for it, even if it's 0,01 € per month, I'll be moving to another paid service.
Why I didn't do it myself, pure laziness, but starting to charge would be a kick in the right direction.
Why I didn't do it myself, pure laziness, but starting to charge would be a kick in the right direction.
Which other free email provider are you considering?
>> I'll be moving to another paid service.
> Which other free email provider are you considering?
I think you're talking past each other?
> Which other free email provider are you considering?
I think you're talking past each other?
I switched to Fastmail 2 months ago. It's been painless so far.
How does their search and spam filter compare to gmail?
Not GP but I've been using FM for about 3 years now. I can probably count the spam that has got through their filter in that time on one hand and the same for the inverse of legitimate mail getting caught in the filter (each time it was admittedly sites on the sketchier side of the net).
I can't speak for search as I've probably only searched a couple of times but I found what I was looking for so it's probably fine?
I can't speak for search as I've probably only searched a couple of times but I found what I was looking for so it's probably fine?
It's hard to judge based on two months of use.
With GMail I got no spam in my inbox ever (but still lots of junk email from merchants and political campaigns).
With FastMail, I'm getting maybe 1 spam per week that doesn't get filtered properly. (And it's always from the same domain so far so at some point I'll set up a rule.
For search - I am not a power user and only search plain strings without ever clicking on "advanced" to filter on specific attributes. But every search I've run in FM has so far returned what I was looking for.
With GMail I got no spam in my inbox ever (but still lots of junk email from merchants and political campaigns).
With FastMail, I'm getting maybe 1 spam per week that doesn't get filtered properly. (And it's always from the same domain so far so at some point I'll set up a rule.
For search - I am not a power user and only search plain strings without ever clicking on "advanced" to filter on specific attributes. But every search I've run in FM has so far returned what I was looking for.
Gmail It's the one service easily replaced. If they go this route the internet will be a more decentralized place
Easy? Good luck replacing all your accounts and contacts using your @gmail.com email. You'll move to another provider but you'll need to keep the old GMail one around for a long time before you're safe deleting it.
Been using a different mail provider for 5 years. Just the other month google deleted my gmail account (had it set up to delete after a year of no-login)
It is quite easy to migrate:
1. get a new mail account 2. forward everything from your gmail account 3. sort everything GMail into a separate folder in your new account 4. slowly change email addresses in accounts and let people know your new address.
I think after a year I had 99% of accounts migrated, and can only remember one or two that I moved after that.
It’s a good way to declutter accounts as well and was made a bit easier because I use a password manager.
Also with private emails, if someone contacts me after 5 years, they likely know someone I know and can get my contact Info via them or social media.
Take the opportunity to migrate to a domain you own, because then you are provider independent.
It is quite easy to migrate:
1. get a new mail account 2. forward everything from your gmail account 3. sort everything GMail into a separate folder in your new account 4. slowly change email addresses in accounts and let people know your new address.
I think after a year I had 99% of accounts migrated, and can only remember one or two that I moved after that.
It’s a good way to declutter accounts as well and was made a bit easier because I use a password manager.
Also with private emails, if someone contacts me after 5 years, they likely know someone I know and can get my contact Info via them or social media.
Take the opportunity to migrate to a domain you own, because then you are provider independent.
I went the extra mile and create a random, unique email address for every single service I sign up for, so I know precisely who sells my data to spammers if I ever get any. All the unique addresses redirect to a central one for ease of access.
Often do that as well, but then: What’s the point. Company X leaked my mail, so what? Not much that one can do about it. Now I often group services, e.g. car rentals with car@ and food delivery services with pizza@
It’s awesome for filtering and sorting emails though.
It’s awesome for filtering and sorting emails though.
> Company X leaked my mail, so what?
Report them under GDPR?
Report them under GDPR?
If company X leaks your email, close your account with them and block the address.
Also, it's useful for have i been pwned. One of my few accounts which uses a grouped address is in today's data dump, and it wasn't clear what account it was, because of the grouping.
Also, it's useful for have i been pwned. One of my few accounts which uses a grouped address is in today's data dump, and it wasn't clear what account it was, because of the grouping.
I found it to be the opposite. Have I been pwned is very exhausting to check with dozen of email addresses, or can one check whole domains?
Yes, you can:
https://haveibeenpwned.com/DomainSearch
You can sometimes remedy the problem. I went through a few aliases with Amazon, and finally found the secret option to keep my email private. (By default, they post it on reviews or something stupid.)
It's especially good for apartment searches and job hunting. Companies that try to link buyer and seller are naturally spammy, so you create a new one for each contact. Then when you find one, you delete the others.
It's also makes it dead easy to filter all that information into folders, so you have a neat record of all your interactions with the various companies you're dealing with.
Most importantly: once you find a job / landlord / whatever, you really want a reliable line of communication. This way, your address with them never changes, but all the spam goes into the bit bucket.
It's especially good for apartment searches and job hunting. Companies that try to link buyer and seller are naturally spammy, so you create a new one for each contact. Then when you find one, you delete the others.
It's also makes it dead easy to filter all that information into folders, so you have a neat record of all your interactions with the various companies you're dealing with.
Most importantly: once you find a job / landlord / whatever, you really want a reliable line of communication. This way, your address with them never changes, but all the spam goes into the bit bucket.
I've been doing that through sneakemail.com, but it's a forwarding service and the domains they use routinely get put on lists that claim they're a temporary email service. Then you can't use them to sign up on some sites.
Still, it mostly works. I've got 383 aliases, plus 93 disabled aliases.
Most email providers will let you create aliases, but aliases are an upsell for business plans. Tutanota lets you get more aliases, but they charge you, not kidding, 5 euros a month for 100 aliases. 10 GB of extra storage costs 2.5 euros.
Some of them advertise using address+alias@domain, but that's basically useless.
Fastmail is pretty decent with 600 aliases. That's a definite maybe.
The only one I've found with unlimited aliases is TheXYZ, and they've been around a while.
Still, it mostly works. I've got 383 aliases, plus 93 disabled aliases.
Most email providers will let you create aliases, but aliases are an upsell for business plans. Tutanota lets you get more aliases, but they charge you, not kidding, 5 euros a month for 100 aliases. 10 GB of extra storage costs 2.5 euros.
Some of them advertise using address+alias@domain, but that's basically useless.
Fastmail is pretty decent with 600 aliases. That's a definite maybe.
The only one I've found with unlimited aliases is TheXYZ, and they've been around a while.
I did pretty much a similar thing years ago, but went self-hosted. It took a year or so including the transition phase.
1. Set up incoming E-mail forwarding from mydomain.org to Gmail. Exim will do this, probably all popular mail packages support forwarding well.
2. Start sending E-mail (from Gmail's interface) as [email protected], and tell your friends to use that one.
2.5. (optional) Get your local mail client to work with Gmail's IMAP and SMTP.
3. Take a deep breath and change that MX record.
4. Block out one or two evenings, pour yourself some Scotch, and go through each and every online account you have, changing your E-mail address. A password manager helps with this because it's also the definitive list of every online account you have. While you're at it, you might want to use [email protected] so you can tell which E-mails come from which company, and know who is selling your E-mail address around.
5. Wait until people switch over and the vast majority of your E-mail is going to [email protected] instead of your Gmail address. For me this took a year or so.
6. In the mean time set up locally hosted E-mail at mydomain.org. In my case I use exim4+dovecot+spamassassin. Don't forget to set up SPF and DKIM correctly.
7. Pick a time in your life when you don't expect to be getting urgent or important E-mail, like you're not buying a house or applying for jobs. Take a deep breath, and apply the exim config that changes you from forwarding to self-hosting.
8. Ask all your friends to send you some test E-mails, preferably from different providers. Make sure you can at least deliver mail from gmail, yahoo, comcast, verizon, etc. Send mails to them and make sure they're being delivered.
9. Assuming no problems in 7, pat yourself on the back for being part of the solution rather than the problem.
10. Periodically keep your eye out for trouble. Audit your logs every so often to make sure you're not having trouble sending or receiving. I had to change my IPv6 at one point because comcast decided mine belonged to a spammer, but other than that it's been smooth sailing.
11. Decide whether or not to keep your Gmail account. I kept mine, but it pretty much only gets spam now. Maybe once or twice a year I get a legit one there from someone I forgot to tell I changed my address. I keep an eye on my Gmail to find out when there are hot singles in my area or that there's a new sure fire diet pill that sheds fat instantly.
1. Set up incoming E-mail forwarding from mydomain.org to Gmail. Exim will do this, probably all popular mail packages support forwarding well.
2. Start sending E-mail (from Gmail's interface) as [email protected], and tell your friends to use that one.
2.5. (optional) Get your local mail client to work with Gmail's IMAP and SMTP.
3. Take a deep breath and change that MX record.
4. Block out one or two evenings, pour yourself some Scotch, and go through each and every online account you have, changing your E-mail address. A password manager helps with this because it's also the definitive list of every online account you have. While you're at it, you might want to use [email protected] so you can tell which E-mails come from which company, and know who is selling your E-mail address around.
5. Wait until people switch over and the vast majority of your E-mail is going to [email protected] instead of your Gmail address. For me this took a year or so.
6. In the mean time set up locally hosted E-mail at mydomain.org. In my case I use exim4+dovecot+spamassassin. Don't forget to set up SPF and DKIM correctly.
7. Pick a time in your life when you don't expect to be getting urgent or important E-mail, like you're not buying a house or applying for jobs. Take a deep breath, and apply the exim config that changes you from forwarding to self-hosting.
8. Ask all your friends to send you some test E-mails, preferably from different providers. Make sure you can at least deliver mail from gmail, yahoo, comcast, verizon, etc. Send mails to them and make sure they're being delivered.
9. Assuming no problems in 7, pat yourself on the back for being part of the solution rather than the problem.
10. Periodically keep your eye out for trouble. Audit your logs every so often to make sure you're not having trouble sending or receiving. I had to change my IPv6 at one point because comcast decided mine belonged to a spammer, but other than that it's been smooth sailing.
11. Decide whether or not to keep your Gmail account. I kept mine, but it pretty much only gets spam now. Maybe once or twice a year I get a legit one there from someone I forgot to tell I changed my address. I keep an eye on my Gmail to find out when there are hot singles in my area or that there's a new sure fire diet pill that sheds fat instantly.
I tried self hosting. And even with SPF and DKIM set up correctly my e-mails to Outlook.com (and assocciated other domains) was just dropped. It didn't go to the spam folder, it was just silently dropped. At the time I heard that this was essentially expected behavior for an IP without a good enough trust record. This even happened when I replied to mail sent from an Outlook.com account. Having my e-mail randomly not reach its intended recipient was and is still unacceptable to me, so I bit the bullet and paid for hosting on my own domain. And while I'm still not happy about paying for hosting that I have sufficient capacity for on my own servers, I have otherwise been happy with it "just working".
Exactly my experience too.
If there’s one thing I want an antitrust investigation to focus on, it’s the gradual monopoly that Google/Microsoft/etc have inadvertently built over “clean” IP addresses. It’s now practically impossible for independents and small businesses to run their own mail servers.
I’m not blaming Google/etc for it, but it is a situation that requires a fix.
If there’s one thing I want an antitrust investigation to focus on, it’s the gradual monopoly that Google/Microsoft/etc have inadvertently built over “clean” IP addresses. It’s now practically impossible for independents and small businesses to run their own mail servers.
I’m not blaming Google/etc for it, but it is a situation that requires a fix.
Might I ask what password manager you use? And what do you do when you need to access websites from a machine that isn't yours? Also, did you consider the single-point-of-failure argument? I would like to know your opinion on that.
Also not OP, but I use pass.
If I need to access accounts from a different machine I use termux and manually type it in.
I'm not worried about it being a single point of failure (Data loss wise), as I have the password store backed up in multiple places. Security wise, I'm trading out my brain as a single point of failure for pass being a single point of failure. I trust pass more.
If I need to access accounts from a different machine I use termux and manually type it in.
I'm not worried about it being a single point of failure (Data loss wise), as I have the password store backed up in multiple places. Security wise, I'm trading out my brain as a single point of failure for pass being a single point of failure. I trust pass more.
Not OP. I’ve been using 1Password for about 13 years now. I have the app on my phone and I can view the password and type it manually in a machine I don’t own. It’s inconvenient but it works.
Used lastpass back then, now Enpass with sync across devices (tablet, phone, PC). Regular backups of the Enpass file into a folder that is synced to my NAS.
Wanted to look into other password managers, preferably open source, but at the time Enpass had the best syncing options combined with a good enough user interface that’s suitable for less tech folks.
Edit: I mainly use all the things on my devices, and don’t try to use things from untrusted devices. The only use cases with untrusted are:
- copy shop -> Sending the file via share drop
- PC of a Family member -> manually typing password from phone.
Wanted to look into other password managers, preferably open source, but at the time Enpass had the best syncing options combined with a good enough user interface that’s suitable for less tech folks.
Edit: I mainly use all the things on my devices, and don’t try to use things from untrusted devices. The only use cases with untrusted are:
- copy shop -> Sending the file via share drop
- PC of a Family member -> manually typing password from phone.
Keepass with the password database stored in Dropbox. If I need to log in on a new machine I check the password on my phone.
I switched everything over to protonmail a few years ago.
I’m was never as invested in gmail as a lot of people, but it was my primary email for many years.
It was still a pain to switch, especially since i started fresh (no email / contact transfers). Now they have better tools to transfer email but after some thought, i wanted to start over with everything.
It did feel really good once it was done. It forced me to evaluate what was important vs what wasn’t, and it got me pretty organized.
Not for everyone but its doable. My guess is it took 6 months for me. I do have my gmail account yet just in case but its been a few years since anything important showed up there. I mainly keep it for youtube anyway.
I’m was never as invested in gmail as a lot of people, but it was my primary email for many years.
It was still a pain to switch, especially since i started fresh (no email / contact transfers). Now they have better tools to transfer email but after some thought, i wanted to start over with everything.
It did feel really good once it was done. It forced me to evaluate what was important vs what wasn’t, and it got me pretty organized.
Not for everyone but its doable. My guess is it took 6 months for me. I do have my gmail account yet just in case but its been a few years since anything important showed up there. I mainly keep it for youtube anyway.
People you actually want to speak with will learn very quickly when their messages don’t get through. Sure, keep your gmail alive whilst you transition yourself, but don’t leave it hanging around too long. The inertia will kill you.
Sure, you just set up forwarding (oh look, forwarding just became a paid feature in Gmail!) and then respond from your new email, and over time it will fix itself and you won't lose emails..
Definitely, the point is you'll have to pay Google whether you want it or not, if they make GMail a premium product. So it's not so easy to leave at all.
Fair.. I've actually been looking at paid email services lately, thinking that perhaps I would rather pay a reasonably yearly fee to have more guarantees and perhaps a bit more control over my email.
Search is the one service easily replaced. Took me ~5mins to switch to DuckDuckGo.
[deleted]
What do you mean by gmail subs?
Sounds like he's suggesting that you'll soon be required to pay for it.
You are already paying for it with massive crawling of your personal information.
Are there any events over the last decade that leads to believe either of these are true?
1/ if you're paying with money, you won't have to pay with personal information
2/ if you're paying with personal information, you wont later have to pay some other way as well
Monopolies (or near monopolies) like to double-dip. A good example of this is net-neutrality. You already pay to be a customer of your ISP, and for your ISP to provide you with Internet access. Your ISP stands to profit even more if they can charge the rest of the Internet for supplying that access to you.
1/ if you're paying with money, you won't have to pay with personal information
2/ if you're paying with personal information, you wont later have to pay some other way as well
Monopolies (or near monopolies) like to double-dip. A good example of this is net-neutrality. You already pay to be a customer of your ISP, and for your ISP to provide you with Internet access. Your ISP stands to profit even more if they can charge the rest of the Internet for supplying that access to you.
Forget monopolies - the New York Times is a double dipper along with the long standing practice of selling mailing lists when a company goes bankrupt.
>So in that respect, it's kind of a shitty move by Google.
12 years of free video hosting with no ads and a platform for people to discover your videos is quite the deal.
They always had to add ads at some point, hosting video, and the bandwidth and transcoding that goes with it, is incredibly expensive, not to mention the dev time going into creating such a massive platform.
If you thought you could eat a free lunch forever... Well, I guess this is your rude awakening. But you honestly should have expected it.
The discovery feature of Youtube shouldn't be understated either. A large number of creators have most of their audiences because of Youtube. And honestly your example of Jim Sterling sounds like a smaller company would have gone out of their way to ban them. He's reaping all the benefits of the platform while giving nothing back.
12 years of free video hosting with no ads and a platform for people to discover your videos is quite the deal.
They always had to add ads at some point, hosting video, and the bandwidth and transcoding that goes with it, is incredibly expensive, not to mention the dev time going into creating such a massive platform.
If you thought you could eat a free lunch forever... Well, I guess this is your rude awakening. But you honestly should have expected it.
The discovery feature of Youtube shouldn't be understated either. A large number of creators have most of their audiences because of Youtube. And honestly your example of Jim Sterling sounds like a smaller company would have gone out of their way to ban them. He's reaping all the benefits of the platform while giving nothing back.
I don't really understand bringing up the "hosting video is so expensive; poor poor Youtube being exploited by nasty creators" angle.
It's a symbiotic relationship. Without content creators, Youtube is nothing. Without Youtube's massive user base, content creators will reach no one. Meanwhile, Youtube is the one making money over fist (4-5 billion dollars per quarter), so I don't understand why we should feel sorry for their hosting costs.
It's a symbiotic relationship. Without content creators, Youtube is nothing. Without Youtube's massive user base, content creators will reach no one. Meanwhile, Youtube is the one making money over fist (4-5 billion dollars per quarter), so I don't understand why we should feel sorry for their hosting costs.
>Without content creators
Without content creators who refuse to allow ads in exchange for free hosting, is it nothing? Probably not, most creators do enjoy making money, and most of the ones putting out content for free, but without ads, will struggle to find a competitor who will indefinitely provide free hosting.
>4-5 billion dollars per quarter
In revenue, not profit. Very, very important distinction.
Without content creators who refuse to allow ads in exchange for free hosting, is it nothing? Probably not, most creators do enjoy making money, and most of the ones putting out content for free, but without ads, will struggle to find a competitor who will indefinitely provide free hosting.
>4-5 billion dollars per quarter
In revenue, not profit. Very, very important distinction.
I mean... you take the good with the bad to get the breadth and depth in your platform. You make a shitload of money on PewDiePie and nothing on Mieleman (sorry; I forget the name of the German guy who posts videos of washing machine cycles), and balance the two. It's not difficult.
~~Okay then, 15 billion in profits last year. I'm no businessman but to me that's pretty damn good profits with those revenue numbers.~~
Edit: Alright, Google search failed me. Searching for profits gave me revenue. Sorry about that. Profits are still secret, it seems. But the hosting costs won't eat the lion's share of that, I can assure you.
~~Okay then, 15 billion in profits last year. I'm no businessman but to me that's pretty damn good profits with those revenue numbers.~~
Edit: Alright, Google search failed me. Searching for profits gave me revenue. Sorry about that. Profits are still secret, it seems. But the hosting costs won't eat the lion's share of that, I can assure you.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21121370/youtube-advertisi...
Well according to this $8.5 billion of that is given to creators. Leaving 6.5 billion for hosting costs, development, and all the management that goes with a platform of that size. About 2.8 billion hours were spent watching youtube in 2019.
Well according to this $8.5 billion of that is given to creators. Leaving 6.5 billion for hosting costs, development, and all the management that goes with a platform of that size. About 2.8 billion hours were spent watching youtube in 2019.
[deleted]
...again my friend, that is the revenue number. Searching Youtube revenue 2019 gives you exactly that number.
> They always had to add ads at some point, hosting video, and the bandwidth and transcoding that goes with it, is incredibly expensive, not to mention the dev time going into creating such a massive platform.
This isn't about covering expenses that they couldn't afford otherwise. This is about making enormously rich people even richer.
This isn't about covering expenses that they couldn't afford otherwise. This is about making enormously rich people even richer.
>This isn't about covering expenses that they couldn't afford otherwise. This is about making enormously rich people even richer.
So you truly believe people should be entitled to free video hosting?
It literally costs money to host content. If you make the platform no money, Youtube has no obligation to keep you around. Just because I pay for my groceries doesn't mean you get yours for free. Just because one person is paying doesn't mean an equal numbers of others don't have to.
So you truly believe people should be entitled to free video hosting?
It literally costs money to host content. If you make the platform no money, Youtube has no obligation to keep you around. Just because I pay for my groceries doesn't mean you get yours for free. Just because one person is paying doesn't mean an equal numbers of others don't have to.
I simply stated that this isn't about covering necessary expenses that wouldn't have been able to be covered otherwise, which is how you initially framed it.
YouTube made it big encouraging that wide range of creators to come to their platform, then once they've established their monopoly they turn around and kick off the ones that are inconvenient for them. That feels immoral.
Are you sure? Google has been on a kick for some time now to try and ensure each product area is independently profitable. Up until a few years ago the status quo was that search/content ads made all the money, and every other product burned it in a giant furnace of endless massive losses. Seems they're now trying to get a grip on that as they're realising even search ads can't keep growing revenue forever.
It's entirely possible that YouTube has never been profitable. The costs involved with it are stupendous. It's far more than just bandwidth. Storage and CPU for transcoding, the enormous databases required for Content ID, recommendations, comments and anti-spam, all the private videos you can't even see at all, etc. Then there's software development costs to manage the bandwidth and operations.
It's entirely possible that YouTube has never been profitable. The costs involved with it are stupendous. It's far more than just bandwidth. Storage and CPU for transcoding, the enormous databases required for Content ID, recommendations, comments and anti-spam, all the private videos you can't even see at all, etc. Then there's software development costs to manage the bandwidth and operations.
Most businesses don’t give away products or services away for free on a mass scale despite being able to afford to do so.
>This is about making enormously rich people even richer.
Isn't Youtube still not making a profit?
Isn't Youtube still not making a profit?
> If you thought you could eat a free lunch forever... Well, I guess this is your rude awakening. But you honestly should have expected it.
just sucks & is such a Lucy pulling out the football move, that YouTube helps everyone & especially the very small folk, rises to meteoric heights/total monolopy, then won't let some small fry newcomers enjoy either an unbelievably modest revenue or give away an ad-free experience to their new watchers.
> The discovery feature of Youtube shouldn't be understated either.
100% a video monopoly. youtube has us, has us all.
just sucks & is such a Lucy pulling out the football move, that YouTube helps everyone & especially the very small folk, rises to meteoric heights/total monolopy, then won't let some small fry newcomers enjoy either an unbelievably modest revenue or give away an ad-free experience to their new watchers.
> The discovery feature of Youtube shouldn't be understated either.
100% a video monopoly. youtube has us, has us all.
Jim uses an interesting strategy to achieve ad-free status, though. He purposefully includes content from many copyright holders that default to claiming the entire video. Since apparently highlander rules apply, the system just won't play ads on his stuff.
The rules are complicated[0] and they say "If all valid claims monetize the video, revenue is divided by the number of claims except in special cases such as cover revshare and music."
So just having content from multiple copyright holders doesn't necessarily stop ads from playing. However, that policy also says "If one of the assets claiming a video has missing ownership information, the default policy action is Track (owner missing)." which "Allows video to be viewable on YouTube and tracks viewership, but does not serve ads against it."[1]
An alternative might just be to add some content at the end of the video which is not advertiser-friendly, which would demonetise the video while not annoying the viewers too much.
[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6300781?hl=en
[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6085494?hl=en
So just having content from multiple copyright holders doesn't necessarily stop ads from playing. However, that policy also says "If one of the assets claiming a video has missing ownership information, the default policy action is Track (owner missing)." which "Allows video to be viewable on YouTube and tracks viewership, but does not serve ads against it."[1]
An alternative might just be to add some content at the end of the video which is not advertiser-friendly, which would demonetise the video while not annoying the viewers too much.
[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6300781?hl=en
[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6085494?hl=en
> I know there are several content creators (such as Jim Sterling) that have their videos ad-free as a perk for their supporters (since he's supported enough via Patreon). He's pretty angry about this change.
That just comes off as entitled. Youtube is providing free bandwidth, hosting, and advertising for his patreon.
That just comes off as entitled. Youtube is providing free bandwidth, hosting, and advertising for his patreon.
> That just comes off as entitled. Youtube is providing free bandwidth, hosting, and advertising for his patreon.
Youtube has been promoting that you can do that since 2008 - https://techcrunch.com/2008/03/12/youtube-the-platform/ - so maybe "entitled" isn't the word. It's expected because the capability has been promoted.
However, in the same article you'll note this little tidbit:
In general if a video is uploaded to YouTube, in some cases we serve ads into that on YouTube.com. When people embed those we reserve rights to serve ads in the future.
Youtube has been promoting that you can do that since 2008 - https://techcrunch.com/2008/03/12/youtube-the-platform/ - so maybe "entitled" isn't the word. It's expected because the capability has been promoted.
However, in the same article you'll note this little tidbit:
In general if a video is uploaded to YouTube, in some cases we serve ads into that on YouTube.com. When people embed those we reserve rights to serve ads in the future.
> Of course, it is not exactly free. The videos will also be available on YouTube, where Google will make money from any associated ads. It is not clear how the ad revenue will be split, or even if it will be.
The article you posted doesn't mention that YouTube is promoting ad-free hosting that the creator doesn't have to pay for.
The article you posted doesn't mention that YouTube is promoting ad-free hosting that the creator doesn't have to pay for.
> The article you posted doesn't mention that YouTube is promoting ad-free hosting that the creator doesn't have to pay for.
The article from 2008 doesn't mention that butterflys might be appearing across the video randomly either. How is what they didn't specifically say (or imply) relevant? I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.
I thought the messages from that far back was interesting, which hedged toward this eventual practice.
The article from 2008 doesn't mention that butterflys might be appearing across the video randomly either. How is what they didn't specifically say (or imply) relevant? I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.
I thought the messages from that far back was interesting, which hedged toward this eventual practice.
I thought you you were saying that YouTube has been marketing ad free video hosting since 2008 and the article was the evidence of that.
I must have misunderstood.
I must have misunderstood.
The article seems pretty upfront that ads may be played on videos uploaded to YouTube.
“Free” means he doesn’t need to pay for hosting, and he doesn’t.
“Free” means he doesn’t need to pay for hosting, and he doesn’t.
Perhaps YT should have a tiered paid account system - as a content creator you pay a small monthly fee (relative to the local country) to cover costs... say €1 per month for 10hrs of content? As the channel grows in size (and ideally, viewings), the costs go up.
It would certainly reduce the amount of junk uploaded to the internet.
It would certainly reduce the amount of junk uploaded to the internet.
Yeah should be - but the costs would be in terms of 100s of EUR per month, not 1EUR. This is why none of those creators really go on their own - hosting video is EXPENSIVE.
It's easier to demand YT to host the content for free.
It's easier to demand YT to host the content for free.
No, the real reason they don't go on their own is because of the massive user base.
> costs would be in terms of 100s of EUR per month
Personally, I don't consider it a valid point.
It only costs so much to share some data because of massive centralization by the likes of Google and ISPs, and can only be sustained because of t sustained because these "subsidies" from large players. It's not technically hard to distribute some videos efficiently, but the market is less than 1/10000.
Maybe in 5 years it will be near impossible to host a web site without being DDOS-ed, but I won't praise Cloudflare for their now-possibly-not-free service, I will blame them along side ISPs.
Personally, I don't consider it a valid point.
It only costs so much to share some data because of massive centralization by the likes of Google and ISPs, and can only be sustained because of t sustained because these "subsidies" from large players. It's not technically hard to distribute some videos efficiently, but the market is less than 1/10000.
Maybe in 5 years it will be near impossible to host a web site without being DDOS-ed, but I won't praise Cloudflare for their now-possibly-not-free service, I will blame them along side ISPs.
shrug
These were the prices before YouTube really became big and were still the prices after they became big.
I've worked in video streamin industry in years and I haven't seen YouTube be the fault of the high costs. It mostly comes from the fact that videos are large, they need a lot of CPU power to convert and need a lot of bandwidth to transmit to clients.
These were the prices before YouTube really became big and were still the prices after they became big.
I've worked in video streamin industry in years and I haven't seen YouTube be the fault of the high costs. It mostly comes from the fact that videos are large, they need a lot of CPU power to convert and need a lot of bandwidth to transmit to clients.
There was a time when downloading movies took hours, or even days. Nowadays, you can stream via popcorn time for basically free¹.
As for CPU, storage - I don't think 10+ different formats at extreme compression are a hard requirement.
Youtube ads are good, as people will have incentive to use peertube and similar.
¹ You need some seeds, but they don't need Tbps pipes.
As for CPU, storage - I don't think 10+ different formats at extreme compression are a hard requirement.
Youtube ads are good, as people will have incentive to use peertube and similar.
¹ You need some seeds, but they don't need Tbps pipes.
>There was a time when downloading movies took hours, or even days. Nowadays, you can stream via popcorn time for basically free¹.
And a willingness to steal...
And a willingness to steal...
For the record, argument was of declining distribution costs for content you presumably have the right to share, e.g. created yourself.
Copyright infringement isn't theft.
Illegal copying? Call it what you will, if you had paid for the Dark Knight, WB would get $5. Instead they get $0.
It's illegal and if everyone did it, movies would not exist.
It's illegal and if everyone did it, movies would not exist.
If everyone that would have paid pirates a movie then the movie industry collapses.
If everyone that wouldn't have paid pirates a movie then nothing bad happens and people enjoy things.
Arguing one of those facts while ignoring the other one is a mark of a bad argument.
If everyone that wouldn't have paid pirates a movie then nothing bad happens and people enjoy things.
Arguing one of those facts while ignoring the other one is a mark of a bad argument.
If everyone took the bus the car industry would also collapse. But if buses didn't exist people might take the train instead.
You can't just assume that people that don't use your service would be paying customers if a specific alternative wasn't there.
You can't just assume that people that don't use your service would be paying customers if a specific alternative wasn't there.
Youtubers take a 55% cut of ad revenue, which is about 1.8 cents per view. Youtube takes a 45% cut, but part of that is to subsidize the videos that currently don't have ads, so let's say 20% of current ad revenue is a reasonble price of Youtube removing ads from a single video.
For a video viewed a million times, it would cost a creator $6545 (.018 x 20/55 x 1,000,000) to keep the video ad free. I can't imagine anyone willing to pay that much to keep their videos ad-free.
For a video viewed a million times, it would cost a creator $6545 (.018 x 20/55 x 1,000,000) to keep the video ad free. I can't imagine anyone willing to pay that much to keep their videos ad-free.
Or YouTube could provide a way for creators to remove ads. There is a membership program so people can directly support specific channels, but it has no option to remove ads for members.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7544492?hl=en
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7544492?hl=en
Members still see ads? That's incredible. I just naturally assumed channels would be ad-free for paying members, since that's how it works on Twitch.
Precisely. If he's selling ad-free versions, he can just host them himself.
"...and pretty much have their entire business on there..."
This is what I don't get about YouTubers. They created a business with basically only one source of income. This is bad practice in every business book.
I am a freelancer. If I only had one customer my business would be instantly over when they didn't hire me anymore.
YouTubers put too much trust in an untrustworthy business partner.
This is what I don't get about YouTubers. They created a business with basically only one source of income. This is bad practice in every business book.
I am a freelancer. If I only had one customer my business would be instantly over when they didn't hire me anymore.
YouTubers put too much trust in an untrustworthy business partner.
> This is what I don't get about YouTubers. They created a business with basically only one source of income.
More importantly, they also then decided to scam their source of income by getting money from other sources (e.g. Patreon) and are now acting surprised when their own data host isn't happy about not getting their cut of the revenue.
Reminds of a scam that cinemas attempted in my state - because the distributor wanted a % cut from movie tickets, they sold cheap tickets and then charged rent for 3D glasses required for a movie (e.g. 2EUR for ticket and 12EUR for the glasses). The distributors took their distribution rights because of that at all.
Trying to scam your most important source of revenue is just a really bad business decision.
More importantly, they also then decided to scam their source of income by getting money from other sources (e.g. Patreon) and are now acting surprised when their own data host isn't happy about not getting their cut of the revenue.
Reminds of a scam that cinemas attempted in my state - because the distributor wanted a % cut from movie tickets, they sold cheap tickets and then charged rent for 3D glasses required for a movie (e.g. 2EUR for ticket and 12EUR for the glasses). The distributors took their distribution rights because of that at all.
Trying to scam your most important source of revenue is just a really bad business decision.
How is it a "scam" to have other sources of income for a video?
The YT deal is that they take a cut of (ad) revenue to fund storage, cpu, bandwidth costs and profit in exchange for hosting the content.
Many of these content providers disabled the feature effectively making YT operate at a loss to host their video while continuing to use the platform.
I already have shown you other examples of these types of attempts which also didn't fly. You can't sell a TV in Walmart for 0.99$ and then have a hidden checque for 900$ in the box so you avoid giving Walmart their margin for the sale.
Many of these content providers disabled the feature effectively making YT operate at a loss to host their video while continuing to use the platform.
I already have shown you other examples of these types of attempts which also didn't fly. You can't sell a TV in Walmart for 0.99$ and then have a hidden checque for 900$ in the box so you avoid giving Walmart their margin for the sale.
The problem being that "the YT deal" keeps being unilaterally changed by Google/YouTube.
First they adjusted the cut.
Then came the copyright strike system which stops the creator being paid and diverts all and revenue to the claimant automatically.
Followed by the adpocalypse whe your video will be demonitised for reasons only known to YT for being "advertiser unfriendly" with recourse taking so long you've missed the most profitable time for views (the first few days).
Then came the algorithm changes that decimated discovery which negates the huge benefit of publishing on YT (exposure).
Let's not forget just straight up not showing subscribers your channels videos (Remember to like and subscribe, and smash the notification bell!)
And each time YT reply with "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further"
I can't think why creators would look to monetize their content with external sources.
First they adjusted the cut.
Then came the copyright strike system which stops the creator being paid and diverts all and revenue to the claimant automatically.
Followed by the adpocalypse whe your video will be demonitised for reasons only known to YT for being "advertiser unfriendly" with recourse taking so long you've missed the most profitable time for views (the first few days).
Then came the algorithm changes that decimated discovery which negates the huge benefit of publishing on YT (exposure).
Let's not forget just straight up not showing subscribers your channels videos (Remember to like and subscribe, and smash the notification bell!)
And each time YT reply with "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further"
I can't think why creators would look to monetize their content with external sources.
The explanation I've heard from many of the Youtube "creators" I'm subscribed to is that Youtube have taken a larger and larger slice of the revenue cake on views over the years that creators have been forced to look to other income streams like Patreon, because they're just barely making any money on the platform anymore.
It would be great if YouTube let creators pay for hosting directly (just like other web hosts) if they wanted to maintain the ad-free experience for their viewers.
(YouTube monetizes directly with its viewers too: https://www.youtube.com/premium )
(YouTube monetizes directly with its viewers too: https://www.youtube.com/premium )
Yeah, it certanly would be great and it would IMO end up with a healthier ecosystem.
This explanation makes sense. I would only call it a scam if its against their TOS. Are these youtubers not checking the "paid content" checkbox? Or does that only apply to paid advertisement of the actual subject of the video?
Did Google ever offer an alternate revshare plan?
Generally I think many YT creators have multiple sources of income (ads, Patreon, merch, sponsored vids)--as such they have many "customers". It's their distribution channel that's locked up.
I totally agree, but there simply isn't a good competitor to YouTube, so they're stuck. I know LTT (Linus Tech Tips) have tried to divest their content so its available on multiple platforms, but the one they used that was paid and ad free shutdown cause it wasn't profitable. They've now set up their own I think which other tech YouTubers also use.
So some are trying to get away from YouTubes monopoly but many cant.
So some are trying to get away from YouTubes monopoly but many cant.
The channels do seem to split into other services on groups. Educational/explainer creators went to nebula (not sure who led that one), comedy/entertainment went to dropout.tv (from CollegeHumor), tech went to floatplane (from ltt), etc. There will be more of those and I can't wait to see who embraces/monetizes p2p first.
If their skill is to create popular videos, they did not had much choice. It is not like there would be other popular video services that would compete.
For many of them, it is youtube or nothing.
For many of them, it is youtube or nothing.
> For many of them, it is youtube or nothing.
Is this really true? I mean, there are hundreds of video hosting sites, is YT really the only way of making any money?
This is like saying that the only way to make your business sustainable is to get a reserved place on NY Times Square... are you really entitled to it?
Is this really true? I mean, there are hundreds of video hosting sites, is YT really the only way of making any money?
This is like saying that the only way to make your business sustainable is to get a reserved place on NY Times Square... are you really entitled to it?
I don't know about hundreda of video hosting sites. I know aboit two: youtube and twitch. I tried something else maybe twice.
I am pretty representative for typical user. Typical user turns on yoitube and only things in there exists.
I am pretty representative for typical user. Typical user turns on yoitube and only things in there exists.
Typical users aren't relevant here. We're talking about Patreon supporters, people who gave money to a single creator and want an ad free video. They can click a link to vimeo.
But they need to know first. Who looks for something new on viemo? Sure if someone points you to them you will look, but do you go there just to see if there is anything interesting when you are bored?
Patreon supportes dont come from nowhere. They come from watching your videos and hearing "support me on patreon" one too many times.
What are the alternatives that actually offer a better experience? Vimeo, floatplane? Serious question. Because I would love to start spending some time at one.
You too most likely have many single points of failure. Just that it may not have come yet and hopefully never comes.
I hear Floatplane is pretty good these days and really should check it out as the initial creators were more technical than average YouTube (Linus Media Group aka LTT). I have YT premium so won't see any changes but it's not something I'd advocate signing up for at this point. I'm locked into like 2013 pricing and am not touching YT Music.
This is definitely a Google push that will change the platform, I think. RoosterTeeth founders have pushed the whole "your content, your site, your store/etc" for a decade at least and though FloatPlane might be a capable rival as it builds more creators I think that is still true. You need to own your own distribution methods even if YT or another site is primarily where your views come from but that takes resources away from creating your primary content. Hard to do for a solo creator.
This is definitely a Google push that will change the platform, I think. RoosterTeeth founders have pushed the whole "your content, your site, your store/etc" for a decade at least and though FloatPlane might be a capable rival as it builds more creators I think that is still true. You need to own your own distribution methods even if YT or another site is primarily where your views come from but that takes resources away from creating your primary content. Hard to do for a solo creator.
It would be cool of creators such as Jim could start hosting their vids on Peertube or something similar. They could still post on Youtube--just also link to the other option for an ad-free experience.
Hopefully Goog won't bring down the hammer on cross-posting videos!!
Hopefully Goog won't bring down the hammer on cross-posting videos!!
I imagine creators like Jim Sterling would be even more outraged if YouTube asked for a percentage of their Patreon revenue or whatever they make from external sponsors.
They could let creators pay to remove ads from their video. Making Youtube like a usual hosting service.
> But at the same time, there are people who have so heavily invested into the YouTube ecosystem with certain expectations for a very long time, and pretty much have their entire business on there, so they can't very easily take their business elsewhere if they're unhappy with the change.
> It would be a massive undertaking to shift their backlog of videos onto another service, and they'd lose all their existing subscribers and have to build it up elsewhere.
To me this sounds like a description of YouTube's business model — one that works for other services too, because people go along with it.
So this seems... unsurprising to me. I'm genuinely curious to know what YouTube users were expecting instead. I get the impression some people see this as a breach of trust, but to me it seems like the obvious thing YouTube would do.
> It would be a massive undertaking to shift their backlog of videos onto another service, and they'd lose all their existing subscribers and have to build it up elsewhere.
To me this sounds like a description of YouTube's business model — one that works for other services too, because people go along with it.
So this seems... unsurprising to me. I'm genuinely curious to know what YouTube users were expecting instead. I get the impression some people see this as a breach of trust, but to me it seems like the obvious thing YouTube would do.
If let's say that google charges 1$ (or more, adjust yourself) per gb of stored video, or 1$ per 20gb of bandwidth use to opt out of ads, will it be better?
Speaking for myself, I would be willing to pay YouTube to opt out of ads. I post mostly classical music videos, which are totally ruined if video advertisements are inserted in the middle. (Granted, YouTube doesn't seem to do that to classical music videos quite as much as it used to.)
I'm already paying Vimeo for a low-budget data plan, and I only continue to use YouTube as my main platform because of the extra exposure.
I'm already paying Vimeo for a low-budget data plan, and I only continue to use YouTube as my main platform because of the extra exposure.
I would be willing to pay YouTube to opt out of adsNo, what he meant is that creators can pay YouTube/Google to not put ads on all of their videos for all of their audience, not YouTube Premium.
No you can't, not as a creator, which is what GP was talking about.
nice name
[deleted]
They don't need to charge, they're making money hand over fist.
> It would be a massive undertaking to shift their backlog of videos onto another service, and they'd lose all their existing subscribers and have to build it up elsewhere.
Fortunately that’s not entirely true, IIUC — LBRY and BitChute can automatically mirror their channels. Anecdotal accounts say LBRY pays orders of magnitude more per view IIRC, and doesn’t decrease YouTube growth. minutephysics uses it and still has >5 million subscribers on YT. And failing those, it shouldn’t be too hard to youtube-dl a channel and upload it to a Peertube or GNU mediagoblin (here ’s hoping ytdl starts using git the way its creators intended and moves issue tracking to an antifragile mailing list).
Fortunately that’s not entirely true, IIUC — LBRY and BitChute can automatically mirror their channels. Anecdotal accounts say LBRY pays orders of magnitude more per view IIRC, and doesn’t decrease YouTube growth. minutephysics uses it and still has >5 million subscribers on YT. And failing those, it shouldn’t be too hard to youtube-dl a channel and upload it to a Peertube or GNU mediagoblin (here ’s hoping ytdl starts using git the way its creators intended and moves issue tracking to an antifragile mailing list).
LBRY's main stream page for new users, right now, is a mix of racism, conspiracy theories, and FTC-rules-violating infomercials. Why would I want to dip my toe in there?
For the inevitable moment when Google changes their motto to "be evil"
Hosting this video requires a lot of storage and bandwidth. I would not be surprised to learn YouTube alone requires $50,000,000 to $75,000,000 in hard drive purchases per year. Sure, they make a lot more than that in advertising, but I imagine every year those hosting and storage costs go up.
Why not implement an option for creators to share some of that load if they want to opt-out of advertisements on their videos? That way, everyone wins. YouTube gets money for the hosting of video, creators keep content ad-free.
Why not implement an option for creators to share some of that load if they want to opt-out of advertisements on their videos? That way, everyone wins. YouTube gets money for the hosting of video, creators keep content ad-free.
Or how about paying $5/month for YouTube premium
If only it were that cheap. The cost in the US is $12/month which is ridiculously high considering their “premium” content is garbage as is YouTube Music which is forcibly bundled in.
I prefer the Patreon model where I decide where the money goes. Content creators pay for everything else, why not video hosting too? Then it is up to them what ads if any they run.
> But at the same time, there are people who have so heavily invested into the YouTube ecosystem with certain expectations for a very long time, and pretty much have their entire business on there, so they can't very easily take their business elsewhere if they're unhappy with the change.
Anyone who has invested in creating content and thinking that it would be the way it was forever is naive and has learned a lesson. Most 'old timers' would realize (I know I would) that any business situation can change.
Likewise I fully expect Amazon once they have killed off the competition to raise prices on many items. Sure they will have loss leaders and sure they are already doing it. But it's business no expectation that they won't do what is in their best interest. And this is not a 'shareholder' thing it's a business thing. Same thing would happen if it were a small pizza shop that decided to lower prices and drive others out of business. As long as no rules are broken it's not any worse than a sports team doing whatever they can to win the game. They are not 'in the business' of making it good for others to win. (Same with online gaming).
Anyone who has invested in creating content and thinking that it would be the way it was forever is naive and has learned a lesson. Most 'old timers' would realize (I know I would) that any business situation can change.
Likewise I fully expect Amazon once they have killed off the competition to raise prices on many items. Sure they will have loss leaders and sure they are already doing it. But it's business no expectation that they won't do what is in their best interest. And this is not a 'shareholder' thing it's a business thing. Same thing would happen if it were a small pizza shop that decided to lower prices and drive others out of business. As long as no rules are broken it's not any worse than a sports team doing whatever they can to win the game. They are not 'in the business' of making it good for others to win. (Same with online gaming).
Easy fix, Google can charge the youtube channel owner for hosting their videos or just show adverts.
If you are not familiar with out google do things, They change terms and conditions and bandwidth allowances quite a lot. thats if they don't move their service to the google grave yard. https://killedbygoogle.com/
If you are not familiar with out google do things, They change terms and conditions and bandwidth allowances quite a lot. thats if they don't move their service to the google grave yard. https://killedbygoogle.com/
But also if enough of them move to a new platform, this will hugely boost that platform.
If they can coordinate their efforts of course. It is a big if.
If they can coordinate their efforts of course. It is a big if.
> it's a service that should be allowed to make money even on people who don't want to make money.
Many countries have regulations against non paid work. If google wants to limit monetization for creators but monetize themselves there is something that does not adds up.
Many countries have regulations against non paid work. If google wants to limit monetization for creators but monetize themselves there is something that does not adds up.
I was going to say, Vimeo directly targets the people that want video hosting, want to keep most of their rights and are willing to pay and have a more discerning or targetted audience. Just move to that.
He should have half the content on YouTube then in the end say "click here to view the rest of this video". And it goes to bitchute.
Hmm it’s almost as if G/youtube has a monopoly in the internet video space.
The main issue with YouTube isn't YouTube, but the lack of competition.
Well if he has all the hardcore supporters on Patreon and can communicate with them over there already, changing services become much much easier. Don't really understand the fuzz since he is charging for being ad free anyway. I would be more supportive if ad free ia principle hence for all the visitors.
The amount of support he has on Patreon allows him to go ad-free for all his videos, for everyone. It's not just a 'be a Patreon member and get ad-free videos, otherwise you get ads'. YouTube doesn't have any features to allow that.
What I find more concerning is many people will have uploaded videos with the understanding people could just watch them for free and then died. At which point YouTube is essentially monetizing dead people without paying their estates.
Are people going to need to stipulate in their will to delete all uploaded content to stop crap like this?
Are people going to need to stipulate in their will to delete all uploaded content to stop crap like this?
The estate as the copyright holder (in most cases) can pull down the videos if they like.
YouTube is not obligated to host and serve content for free forever.
As many other big tech companies they have a very strong position in the market (edging into monopoly / duopoly territory), which essentially prevent competitors with different business plans to be successful.
To me this sounds like the market is broken and warrants a critical investigation.
YouTube is not obligated to host and serve content for free forever.
As many other big tech companies they have a very strong position in the market (edging into monopoly / duopoly territory), which essentially prevent competitors with different business plans to be successful.
To me this sounds like the market is broken and warrants a critical investigation.
That supposes the estate is even aware of such content. Which is the issue I am talking about. I would be fine if google disabled formerly free videos until someone agreeded to monetizing them, but to just arbitrarily make that change means it’s done without the possibility of consent.
> I would be fine if google disabled formerly free videos until someone agreed to monetizing them
That seems worse? All these videos that I uploaded become inaccessible just because I'm not around to approve monetization?
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
That seems worse? All these videos that I uploaded become inaccessible just because I'm not around to approve monetization?
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
Should the products of dead people not be monetizable? How about selling a Van Gogh painting?
If you own it sure. However, if you’re suddenly changing contracts after the fact that’s just theft.
What if a backblaze or other backup service just decided it the copyright on all uploaded files after 1 month of non payment and started selling people’s home movies as stock footage?
What if a backblaze or other backup service just decided it the copyright on all uploaded files after 1 month of non payment and started selling people’s home movies as stock footage?
Ah I see. It's a rules thing. In that case it's fine. The ToS explicitly allow this after all. So you aren't really changing things outside of what's allowed.
This is like when you put into a contract "Party A may withdraw from this contract at any point" and then you withdraw at some point. That's playing by the rules.
This is like when you put into a contract "Party A may withdraw from this contract at any point" and then you withdraw at some point. That's playing by the rules.
You can put anything in a ToS, that’s simply not enough. Again, I would be fine if Google simply stopped hosting videos without consent, but behavior changes like this are different.
How is it different?
If you want to make changes to your assets after you die, write a will and hire an executor.
The living aren't obligated to negotiate with the dead.
If you want to make changes to your assets after you die, write a will and hire an executor.
The living aren't obligated to negotiate with the dead.
The issue is you can’t guess every possible change. Let’s suppose Facebook goes broke in 20 years and the new owners decide to make absolutely everything public. That’s going to make a lot of people upset whatever it’s allowed by the TOS so that’s fine right?
If your alive you fight such things by suing the company, but the dead don’t make such choices.
If your alive you fight such things by suing the company, but the dead don’t make such choices.
For better or for worse, dead people (or rather, their estates) can still have copyright ownership of works they've produced.
As a content consumer I see this as a positive thing for me.
A few months ago when YouTube decided to auto-add ads on all videos, my watch time on YouTube decreased by more than 50% since I consume all video content on either my phone or my tablet (where I don't have access to AdBlock), and I find the amount of ads I have to go through to watch a video so annoying that I'd rather not watch it at all.
As a result I spend my free time on Coursera or listening to audiobooks instead and I log in to YouTube once a day to have a quick scroll through the subscriptions page to see if there's anything worth watching. Keeping the amount of ads in mind and the stress they cause me, I am more selective and will often not click on a video that I previously would. And I don't mindlessly binge-watch video for hours on end any longer.
With the new monetisation coming in place, I can see my consumption of YouTube declining even further to the level of Google - use it as a tool, when you really have to and not just for entertainment. And I welcome it! Just thought to share a perspective of a consumer rather than a creator.
On the other hand I do understand YouTube's move. After all, it's their platform and they're not running a charity - people often forget that it's not their birth right to use a company's product or a service without paying for it one way or the other.
A few months ago when YouTube decided to auto-add ads on all videos, my watch time on YouTube decreased by more than 50% since I consume all video content on either my phone or my tablet (where I don't have access to AdBlock), and I find the amount of ads I have to go through to watch a video so annoying that I'd rather not watch it at all.
As a result I spend my free time on Coursera or listening to audiobooks instead and I log in to YouTube once a day to have a quick scroll through the subscriptions page to see if there's anything worth watching. Keeping the amount of ads in mind and the stress they cause me, I am more selective and will often not click on a video that I previously would. And I don't mindlessly binge-watch video for hours on end any longer.
With the new monetisation coming in place, I can see my consumption of YouTube declining even further to the level of Google - use it as a tool, when you really have to and not just for entertainment. And I welcome it! Just thought to share a perspective of a consumer rather than a creator.
On the other hand I do understand YouTube's move. After all, it's their platform and they're not running a charity - people often forget that it's not their birth right to use a company's product or a service without paying for it one way or the other.
It is superficially sad, but as you point out the 2nd order effects are really positive. Google has really done us all a favor by being actually more authentic: they're saying "We're an Advertising company ." (the period is said out loud). They are a tech company insofar as it serves their ad business. They're not a general tech company, and they have no interests or pursuits in anything else unless it is to develop new lines of ad revenue.
I've stopped using Chrome, use gmail only for dealing with companies (their spam), rarely watch YouTube anymore, and use DDG for search. It's _very_ noticeable how little targeted advertising I receive anymore. I have developed a whole new appreciation for my DVD and BluRay collection, and now feel compelled to buy up whatever is available while they last. Physical, own-able media is becoming frighteningly scarce.
I think the Google situation is a deliberate result of restructuring under Alphabet, and in terms of business it's wise. Google is about ads. Other companies of theirs will be about other things.
I've stopped using Chrome, use gmail only for dealing with companies (their spam), rarely watch YouTube anymore, and use DDG for search. It's _very_ noticeable how little targeted advertising I receive anymore. I have developed a whole new appreciation for my DVD and BluRay collection, and now feel compelled to buy up whatever is available while they last. Physical, own-able media is becoming frighteningly scarce.
I think the Google situation is a deliberate result of restructuring under Alphabet, and in terms of business it's wise. Google is about ads. Other companies of theirs will be about other things.
YouTube premium gets rid of all the ads, unless creators have embedded them in the video.
There is lots of good content for toddlers on YouTube, but it is unwatchable with ads. I watch more myself now all the ads are gone, plus you get youtube music, not as good as spotify but good enough.
Cable TV started as paid ad-free TV also. It now has so many ads that it is almost unwatchable at times.
One wonders how much further YouTube can take this - it appears they are approaching the optimal point for extracting revenue from videos, so where is their future revenue growth going to come from?
I miss the YouTube of old rather than this commercialized version. To me, Tik Tok seems like more like the original YouTube than YouTube does.
I for one have become so annoyed with the level of ads that I have reduced my consumption of YouTube. To me, it seems like there is a much higher rate of advertising on a per-content-minute basis on YouTube than there is on TV.
One wonders how much further YouTube can take this - it appears they are approaching the optimal point for extracting revenue from videos, so where is their future revenue growth going to come from?
I miss the YouTube of old rather than this commercialized version. To me, Tik Tok seems like more like the original YouTube than YouTube does.
I for one have become so annoyed with the level of ads that I have reduced my consumption of YouTube. To me, it seems like there is a much higher rate of advertising on a per-content-minute basis on YouTube than there is on TV.
> Cable TV started as paid ad-free TV also.
Not true. Cable TV started by simply sending a copy of broadcast TV over coaxial cable, giving the user a more reliable signal (better picture and sound) compared to a "rabbit ears" antenna, and access to programs from distant cities beyond the limits of good radio reception. That broadcast TV, of course, was a live signal which contained ads in the signal that could not be removed.
Cable TV also offered the end user a convenient box with a digital channel number display and remote control for changing channels. The user was able to flip among dozens of channels without having to fiddle with the UHF/VHF tuning controls of their TV: they tuned the TV to channel 3 (or whatever) and could just leave it, letting the cable box do the channel selection. Cable TV was a major upgrade to the TV set. In particular to a basic model or old TV with only knobs for channel selection, no remote.
Cable TV did offer premium programs also, requiring a "descrambler". Those channels were collectively called "pay TV"; separate from regular broadcast TV. These channels were satellite channels; the user could have obtained them alternatively by installing a dish, and paying for the descrambling.
Not true. Cable TV started by simply sending a copy of broadcast TV over coaxial cable, giving the user a more reliable signal (better picture and sound) compared to a "rabbit ears" antenna, and access to programs from distant cities beyond the limits of good radio reception. That broadcast TV, of course, was a live signal which contained ads in the signal that could not be removed.
Cable TV also offered the end user a convenient box with a digital channel number display and remote control for changing channels. The user was able to flip among dozens of channels without having to fiddle with the UHF/VHF tuning controls of their TV: they tuned the TV to channel 3 (or whatever) and could just leave it, letting the cable box do the channel selection. Cable TV was a major upgrade to the TV set. In particular to a basic model or old TV with only knobs for channel selection, no remote.
Cable TV did offer premium programs also, requiring a "descrambler". Those channels were collectively called "pay TV"; separate from regular broadcast TV. These channels were satellite channels; the user could have obtained them alternatively by installing a dish, and paying for the descrambling.
YouTube will push the needle to the extent Cable did and a new platform will be born. It's the circle of technology. Then the next video platform will feel like the YouTube of ~8 years ago.
The maximally optimal value to the end user waxes and wanes throughout the business cycle, and unfortunately we're in the trough.
The maximally optimal value to the end user waxes and wanes throughout the business cycle, and unfortunately we're in the trough.
I'm honestly not sure we're in the trough. The value of Youtube is pretty tightly correlated to the amount of content on Youtube. While you could argue that the signal to noise ratio is worse, it's very hard to argue that there isn't significantly more 'good' (however you define it) content on youtube that makes it more valuable.
I find paying for Youtube premium an pretty great value, because it has some of the best content for any hobby I may be into. It doesn't have the pure depth of hard core educational content like udemy/coursera/khan has, but I'm really not able to consume that type of content enough to run out.
I find paying for Youtube premium an pretty great value, because it has some of the best content for any hobby I may be into. It doesn't have the pure depth of hard core educational content like udemy/coursera/khan has, but I'm really not able to consume that type of content enough to run out.
It's also key to note that had Cable NOT pushed ads as far as they had, they still would have been disrupted. It was a rational decision, since revenue today is often worth more than in the uncertain-for-so-many-reasons future.
It's part of why you can't rely on the market or competitive forces alone, if you think something is an issue of public good, you need regulation.
It's part of why you can't rely on the market or competitive forces alone, if you think something is an issue of public good, you need regulation.
If they didn't show ads I doubt they would have cared as much about time shifting and ad skipping would never have been relevant. Sure would have helped them avoid collapsing.
Let's not pretend they weren't incredibly hostile to watching shows you're paying for already, when you want to and without the ads you paid to avoid, even though they didn't need to even build any infrastructure for it.
Add the rest of their anti-customer policies like bundling channels and it seems clear that their campaign to get rid of all their cable customers simply succeeded.
Let's not pretend they weren't incredibly hostile to watching shows you're paying for already, when you want to and without the ads you paid to avoid, even though they didn't need to even build any infrastructure for it.
Add the rest of their anti-customer policies like bundling channels and it seems clear that their campaign to get rid of all their cable customers simply succeeded.
And none of that would've prevented Netflix from being a more convenient option that let you watch on many more devices, etc. Especially because the early hook here for Netflix streaming wasn't "watch the stuff currently on cable" it was "watch back catalog stuff that isn't anywhere else right now." So that would still get Netflix in the door, and then once they start doing first-run content, game over in the same way. Nobody would want to buy and set up Tivos or Slingboxes and LAN setups and all just to turn their existing cable subscription into a Netflix subscription when they could just buy the streaming subscription separately.
Sure, the cable companies could've theoretically made Netflix streaming before Netflix did - and the broadcast networks kinda-sorta-tried-this with Hulu - but that had nothing to do with their ad load increasing over time. Hulu was way more convenient than watching the same shows on cable even with ads still! But to go all in on a reinvention towards streaming would've been a huge gamble even seeing the streaming train coming right at them.
Sure, the cable companies could've theoretically made Netflix streaming before Netflix did - and the broadcast networks kinda-sorta-tried-this with Hulu - but that had nothing to do with their ad load increasing over time. Hulu was way more convenient than watching the same shows on cable even with ads still! But to go all in on a reinvention towards streaming would've been a huge gamble even seeing the streaming train coming right at them.
Those time shifting shows appear on broadcast tv across the nation in different time zones. They are not cable channels but broadcast channels appearing in cable. A tv antenia will pick them up.
The timeshifting is the tv stations defense of segmenting their ad market and protecting against local viewer loss that targets ads to markets.
If you in New York watch Denver's version two things happen. New York loses viewers. Denver gains viewers who's local ads are not relevant and those viewers not included when selling ads.
The timeshifting is the tv stations defense of segmenting their ad market and protecting against local viewer loss that targets ads to markets.
If you in New York watch Denver's version two things happen. New York loses viewers. Denver gains viewers who's local ads are not relevant and those viewers not included when selling ads.
Sorry, there must be some overlapping terminology.
I mean time shifting as in what devices such as TiVo did where they would record your shows for you and allow them to play them back whenever you wanted. For some reason Cable companies really hated this idea, presumably because... ads I guess?
I think that if they simply hadn't fought against people trying to basically turn what they already provided into something more like Netflix, those tools would exist and be built with a cable package as a backend.
They provide all the shows in a datastream that they would otherwise provide via cable, let other people deal with paying for developing devices to make it easier to use, and price it more reasonably so that it can compete with a Netflix. I don't know if they'd be able to, but since they own the pipes and own the FCC it seems more likely than not. But they'd be doing a lot better than they seem to be now, they just priced themselves out of the market once networks realized that people would just download their content for free if it was too inconvenient to watch. Better a little than nothing...
I mean time shifting as in what devices such as TiVo did where they would record your shows for you and allow them to play them back whenever you wanted. For some reason Cable companies really hated this idea, presumably because... ads I guess?
I think that if they simply hadn't fought against people trying to basically turn what they already provided into something more like Netflix, those tools would exist and be built with a cable package as a backend.
They provide all the shows in a datastream that they would otherwise provide via cable, let other people deal with paying for developing devices to make it easier to use, and price it more reasonably so that it can compete with a Netflix. I don't know if they'd be able to, but since they own the pipes and own the FCC it seems more likely than not. But they'd be doing a lot better than they seem to be now, they just priced themselves out of the market once networks realized that people would just download their content for free if it was too inconvenient to watch. Better a little than nothing...
The way I see it, YouTube is already being disrupted by platforms like Tik Tok
Youtube should not be watched by kids, it even has a minimum age of 13 in the TOS. Then what?
PBS Kids FTW. No ads, no harmful content, and (probably much) less surveillance.
PBS Kids FTW. No ads, no harmful content, and (probably much) less surveillance.
Similarly, in Australia ABC kids (live and streaming on iView) has more content than any kid could ever consume in a lifetime.
Youtube kids does not have the age 13 requirement.
It still has occasional inappropriate or dumb content and surveillance. Also unclear what % of parents bother with yt kids.
My understanding, Linus Tech Tips did a breakdown of their revenue, is that Youtube premium subscribers get more money to the creators than ads.
With that, the day they bring adverts into Youtube Premium, is the day I stop paying for it. That would be them going the way of cable companies all in.
With that, the day they bring adverts into Youtube Premium, is the day I stop paying for it. That would be them going the way of cable companies all in.
Indeed, I've seen revenue breakdowns from a number of content creators and each of them makes it clear that if you have YouTube premium, when you watch a single video you give the creator approximately 10x the revenue of a single free user who only sees ads.
Likewise, the day that they start putting ads into YouTube premium is the day I abandon the platform.
Likewise, the day that they start putting ads into YouTube premium is the day I abandon the platform.
Agreed.
I had Youtube Premium through Google Play Music until Google finally axed GPM. I was so disappointed by how poorly Google handled that process that I cancelled my subscription and lost my YT premium.
Youtube is completely unbearable without premium - I have no idea how non-subscribers tolerate Youtube content. The ads are so intrusive. I would totally pay $5-$10 per month for a Youtube only subscription but I feel like the $18/mo for a family plan is a bit steep.
I had Youtube Premium through Google Play Music until Google finally axed GPM. I was so disappointed by how poorly Google handled that process that I cancelled my subscription and lost my YT premium.
Youtube is completely unbearable without premium - I have no idea how non-subscribers tolerate Youtube content. The ads are so intrusive. I would totally pay $5-$10 per month for a Youtube only subscription but I feel like the $18/mo for a family plan is a bit steep.
FYI, YouTube Music received almost every feature of Google Play Music except the app design. An in-depth review of the two can be found over here: https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/10/24/google-play-music-t...
Personally I wish all these music streaming services could agree on metadata sharing such that I could enable apps like last.fm to review listening history across every service, and offer my listening history and playlists to every service to receive better recommendations. It feels odd that I can listen to the same song from 4-5 different services that I subscribe to legally, yet none of the services has a complete picture of what I like to listen to unless I pick one and use it as often as I can. I had thought that playlist sync would be a way to improve my recommendations, but it seems most services look at listening history rather than playlists. It's also irritating that every company has its own way of doing playback sync between devices, whether it's AirPlay, ChromeCast, Spotify Connect, Alexa, YouTube app, etc. There is no way things should be this fractured and hard to use for music playback and recommendation in the next decade, we need more standards. :)
Personally I wish all these music streaming services could agree on metadata sharing such that I could enable apps like last.fm to review listening history across every service, and offer my listening history and playlists to every service to receive better recommendations. It feels odd that I can listen to the same song from 4-5 different services that I subscribe to legally, yet none of the services has a complete picture of what I like to listen to unless I pick one and use it as often as I can. I had thought that playlist sync would be a way to improve my recommendations, but it seems most services look at listening history rather than playlists. It's also irritating that every company has its own way of doing playback sync between devices, whether it's AirPlay, ChromeCast, Spotify Connect, Alexa, YouTube app, etc. There is no way things should be this fractured and hard to use for music playback and recommendation in the next decade, we need more standards. :)
Youtube Music's handling of my uploaded music is really poor compared to GPM (sectioned off from everything else), so that alone was enough to make me dump my subscription when GPM was shut down.
Now I run my own Plex server on a Raspberry Pi with an external drive and get a better experience than I had before, minus discovery.
Now I run my own Plex server on a Raspberry Pi with an external drive and get a better experience than I had before, minus discovery.
I actually prefer the way YTM segments my uploads from the general catalog, as it gives me some possibly unfounded confidence in the idea that I'm going to be listening to the edition I expect, and not something like a 20th anniversary re-release with 15 extra tracks. GPM has this really bad problem where their treatment of my uploads was seriously broken and I would see, just as one example, multiple copies of every track on one album. I don't see this since the YTM conversion.
Exactly, I'd pay for Youtube Premium if it didn't come bundled with a music subscription, and the price reflected that.
There's no good content for toddlers on youtube.
Toddlers shouldn't be watching anything.
I recently found this and use it to get and retain all the videos I like (not just from youtube), it's super simple which is exactly why I like it: https://github.com/tomszilagyi/copycat
How is the mobile experience for YT Music? Looking at switching, I imagine they have the desktop experience down. I love Spotify, but I can't imagine a worse experience outside of their mobile app. The web player was nice but fails to load music two-three times per listening session (to be fair, they are usually 5-8hrs), the desktop application is slow, clunky, and will regularly not play music I have downloaded.
I hated it initially, but am fine with it now.
When YTM is better than GPM:
1/ Auto-created playlists, especially after you just search for a song and hit play. On GPM, it would play different covers on the same song (basically all the search results) by default, unless you started a radio, which is a cool concept but was hit and miss in practice. On YTM, it continues with similar songs, and I have liked their selection so far.
2/ The library seems to have increased; I guess they have access to more songs that were YT exclusive for some reason.
3/ While I normally never use video mode on YTM, but once in a while for a cool song, it's nice to be able to seamlessly switch to video and cast to my TV.
On the cons side, I don't like the playlist management and home screen UI (which is what I hated initially), but it's not bothering me much anymore now that I am getting used to it I guess.
Initially, I had planned to just cancel the subscription, but held on because using YouTube with ads was just plain intolerable. I get reminded of this everytime I open a Youtube link on my work account Chrome profile by mistake.
When YTM is better than GPM:
1/ Auto-created playlists, especially after you just search for a song and hit play. On GPM, it would play different covers on the same song (basically all the search results) by default, unless you started a radio, which is a cool concept but was hit and miss in practice. On YTM, it continues with similar songs, and I have liked their selection so far.
2/ The library seems to have increased; I guess they have access to more songs that were YT exclusive for some reason.
3/ While I normally never use video mode on YTM, but once in a while for a cool song, it's nice to be able to seamlessly switch to video and cast to my TV.
On the cons side, I don't like the playlist management and home screen UI (which is what I hated initially), but it's not bothering me much anymore now that I am getting used to it I guess.
Initially, I had planned to just cancel the subscription, but held on because using YouTube with ads was just plain intolerable. I get reminded of this everytime I open a Youtube link on my work account Chrome profile by mistake.
+1 on that last issue. I don't understand why Google doesn't include ad-free YouTube as part of a perk for using Google Workspace. Also I wish I could tell Chrome to open some links in other profiles at all times, and only those links, kind of like Firefox might do. Actually, come to think of it, I probably use Chrome too much and should try alternatives instead.
YouTube Music is so bad I shut down my use of Google for music, unplugged my Google home devices, and migrated to Alexa. Amazon Music is worse than Google Music, but better than YouTube Music.
There's a wide open market for a good music streaming company that integrates with your own albums, that is corporately stable enough not to dissipate after "An Incredible Journey Together". All the different services have weird lockins and major gaps, whether it be uploads, mobile app limitations, interop, etc.
There's a wide open market for a good music streaming company that integrates with your own albums, that is corporately stable enough not to dissipate after "An Incredible Journey Together". All the different services have weird lockins and major gaps, whether it be uploads, mobile app limitations, interop, etc.
Truly painful. On iOS it regularly fails to keep playing the next song in a playlist, which is pretty much unforgivable for a music app.
Here's a longer list of grievances from users who were forced to migrate from Google Play Music: https://www.reddit.com/r/googleplaymusic/comments/icmwdf/one...
Here's a longer list of grievances from users who were forced to migrate from Google Play Music: https://www.reddit.com/r/googleplaymusic/comments/icmwdf/one...
There are three deal breakers for me.
1) You can't organize Albums by artist. 2) Your Youtube (video) likes are included in the pool of liked songs in the music app. 3) Artists you are subscribed to in the music app are included in your Youtube (video) subscriptions.
1) You can't organize Albums by artist. 2) Your Youtube (video) likes are included in the pool of liked songs in the music app. 3) Artists you are subscribed to in the music app are included in your Youtube (video) subscriptions.
Vanced YouTube also gets of rid all the ads and doesn't involve giving money to Google.
Oh, and of course uBlock Origin works fine on proper computers too.
Oh, and of course uBlock Origin works fine on proper computers too.
I can't believe that you actually decided to be held hostage by google and pay them to remove content that they would otherwise only put in front of you if you were looking. Its like paying a restaurant not to harass you and then going to it when you could just go to the restaurant next door without the protection fee. There is also a lot of good content for toddlers IRL.
> Its like paying a restaurant not to harass you and then going to it when you could just go to the restaurant next door without the protection fee.
No, it's like paying the restaurant for the damn food. YouTube hosting all the world's videos forever is not a god given right, nor is being able to watch content people create for free.
I despise ads, absolutely despise them, but gladly pay YouTube the $15/mo to remove them because I know good content needs to be paid for one way or another. There's still a few channels that I like that put in ads during the videos and that's still annoying, but otherwise I never see an ad.
And this is fucking fantastic! Imagine if the web as a whole adopted this. (I know there are efforts including Google's) If I could pay $10/mo to get rid of all ads (explicit and implicit) and have that go towards the creators that I consume content for, then we'd be in a much better place. (imagine if FB just got a cut of that for example, how that would change the dynamics)
No, it's like paying the restaurant for the damn food. YouTube hosting all the world's videos forever is not a god given right, nor is being able to watch content people create for free.
I despise ads, absolutely despise them, but gladly pay YouTube the $15/mo to remove them because I know good content needs to be paid for one way or another. There's still a few channels that I like that put in ads during the videos and that's still annoying, but otherwise I never see an ad.
And this is fucking fantastic! Imagine if the web as a whole adopted this. (I know there are efforts including Google's) If I could pay $10/mo to get rid of all ads (explicit and implicit) and have that go towards the creators that I consume content for, then we'd be in a much better place. (imagine if FB just got a cut of that for example, how that would change the dynamics)
I disagree that it is like it is paying for the food. If I had youtube premium and my entire $10 went to only the creators of the videos I watched using some egalitarian algorithm, then I would be into it. However, it is actually more like Spotify where some portion of my $10 (lets say $7, even though it is probably lower) gets put into a large pool and then distributed among all content creators on the site along with everyone else's premium money.
I have a patreon which I budget $20/mo to actually pay the creators that I care about. Don't kid yourself into thinking your YT premium money is going anywhere except unboxing videos and Minecraft screaming videos and the like.
I have a patreon which I budget $20/mo to actually pay the creators that I care about. Don't kid yourself into thinking your YT premium money is going anywhere except unboxing videos and Minecraft screaming videos and the like.
Do you have any source on how they distribute payments? All I can find is this blurb which could be read lots of different ways (likely by design):
"Currently, new revenue from YouTube Premium membership fees is distributed to video creators based on how much members watch your content. As with our advertising business, most of the revenue will go to creators."
I support some creators via Patreon as well, but honestly that's just more work for me as my interests change and some months I don't consume any of their content.
I imagine the truth is that it is likely something Spotify-like or some variation thereof. I'm still ok with that and YouTube does make it explicit that the majority of my sub goes towards creators. FWIW I suspect there are some reasons that are subtle, bug valid, that Spotify for example distributes subscription fees the way it does, which I agree does seem kinda BS at first blush.
edit: some anecdotal info here saying that creators are indeed paid (handsomly) based on views: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/9agg5f/how_does_yo...
"Currently, new revenue from YouTube Premium membership fees is distributed to video creators based on how much members watch your content. As with our advertising business, most of the revenue will go to creators."
I support some creators via Patreon as well, but honestly that's just more work for me as my interests change and some months I don't consume any of their content.
I imagine the truth is that it is likely something Spotify-like or some variation thereof. I'm still ok with that and YouTube does make it explicit that the majority of my sub goes towards creators. FWIW I suspect there are some reasons that are subtle, bug valid, that Spotify for example distributes subscription fees the way it does, which I agree does seem kinda BS at first blush.
edit: some anecdotal info here saying that creators are indeed paid (handsomly) based on views: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/9agg5f/how_does_yo...
I don't think Spotify is any different here: money goes to creators/artists in proportion to watch/listen time, no?
> held hostage by google... Its like paying a restaurant not to harass you...
This level of entitlement is just staggering. You can pay for YouTube in two ways; watch adds or pay for add free.
Now, I get that the price for watching adds right now is too high. It simply ruins most content. But your metaphors are still just way out there.
In reality there are now 3 "tiers". - Premium. Pay with money. - Get a free taste. Choose if you want it. - Unwatchable content.
I don't think that is going to work out for YouTube in the long run. But shaming people for being willing to pay for actual loads and loads of quality content is not constructive.
On the other hand, I _am_ glad if this means that random, prudish advertising companies will hold less sway over YouTube at some point in the future, where subscriptions make up a bigger part of the revenue.
This level of entitlement is just staggering. You can pay for YouTube in two ways; watch adds or pay for add free.
Now, I get that the price for watching adds right now is too high. It simply ruins most content. But your metaphors are still just way out there.
In reality there are now 3 "tiers". - Premium. Pay with money. - Get a free taste. Choose if you want it. - Unwatchable content.
I don't think that is going to work out for YouTube in the long run. But shaming people for being willing to pay for actual loads and loads of quality content is not constructive.
On the other hand, I _am_ glad if this means that random, prudish advertising companies will hold less sway over YouTube at some point in the future, where subscriptions make up a bigger part of the revenue.
You can't "pay" by watching ads. Watching ads is a harmful and non-productive activity, so it's impossible to be obligated to do it.
If you don't want to watch ads you can always do something else. There's no shortage of things to do, and YouTube need not be high on your list.
I pay $15 / month for the youtube music family plan. That includes ad free youtube and ad free youtube kids.
Youtube kids (with proper video/channel whitelisting) is the main thing my toddlers watch. It has BBC shows (peppa pig), PBS kids, and 2 great kid friendly content crators (Blippi and Steve and Maggie).
Of course there is lots of good "IRL" kids content, but propery setup, Youtube kids is pretty good and fairly priced in my opinion.
Youtube kids (with proper video/channel whitelisting) is the main thing my toddlers watch. It has BBC shows (peppa pig), PBS kids, and 2 great kid friendly content crators (Blippi and Steve and Maggie).
Of course there is lots of good "IRL" kids content, but propery setup, Youtube kids is pretty good and fairly priced in my opinion.
Most content is unbearable with Ads so I pay as I do every other entertainment service that I want to spend my time watching. With YouTube most of the revenue (55%) go to the creator which I'm also happy to support.
IMO it's a net positive that it has created new business models that's open to anyone with a camera/mobile.
IMO it's a net positive that it has created new business models that's open to anyone with a camera/mobile.
One could argue that all good content for toddlers is IRL and none of the content on yt.
Paying for content instead of being fed ads doesn’t seem unbelievable to me.
On the other hand, the method employed by YouTube is just akin to its contents. 90% BS.
On the other hand, the method employed by YouTube is just akin to its contents. 90% BS.
> decided to be held hostage by google and pay them to remove content that they would otherwise only put in front of you if you were looking. Its like paying a restaurant not to harass you and then going to it when you could just go to the restaurant next door without the protection fee.
Unclear why the attitude. Youtube is a business. It doesn't owe users anything for free regardless of what it did in the past or others have done.
Restaurants? You pay them to dine there. They operate at a profit or try to. And restaurants who offer either (or both) better food or experience get to charge more like any other product or service in life.
Sure google or any business does not exist to provide free things to people.
Unclear why the attitude. Youtube is a business. It doesn't owe users anything for free regardless of what it did in the past or others have done.
Restaurants? You pay them to dine there. They operate at a profit or try to. And restaurants who offer either (or both) better food or experience get to charge more like any other product or service in life.
Sure google or any business does not exist to provide free things to people.
Actually, it's about paying for service received. You pay by ads or you pay by wallet.
Paying a fee to disable ads is not new. I've done it so many times before, starting ages ago with Salon.com and continuing on into Patreon-supported podcasts. Why not for YouTube as well?
The best reason I can think of is becasue of this effect: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-...
The best reason I can think of is becasue of this effect: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-...
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> They are a tech company insofar as it serves their [sales] business. They're not a general tech company, and they have no interests or pursuits in anything else unless it is to develop new lines of [sales] revenue.
What's the difference from product-driven or subscription-driven tech businesses?
What's the difference from product-driven or subscription-driven tech businesses?
Who pays.
All companies ultimately are responsive to the wants and needs of their paying customers, within the limits of legality and physics. Do not underestimate how important it is that Google’s paying customers are ad buyers, not you.
All companies ultimately are responsive to the wants and needs of their paying customers, within the limits of legality and physics. Do not underestimate how important it is that Google’s paying customers are ad buyers, not you.
And why would they not also be responsive to the wants and the needs of the customers who look at the ads, without which the model would not be profitable?
They had to create a service people want to use in order to be able to put ads on it.
They had to create a service people want to use in order to be able to put ads on it.
They are responsive. They'll push ads at them to the limit of their endurance, then back off a smidgen and call it good.
And isn't that the same story in any business? They'll raise costs to the limit of customers' endurance, or else reduce quality to compensate?
If there is a problem then the problem is Google. I don't think this can be blamed on just the ad-driven profit model.
If there is a problem then the problem is Google. I don't think this can be blamed on just the ad-driven profit model.
Not a business that is purportedly just a publisher. The channel creators were told they could choose their ad model. That was contradicted by this decision.
Imagine your letter carrier started stamping Aunt Agatha's letters with car ads or whatever.
Imagine your letter carrier started stamping Aunt Agatha's letters with car ads or whatever.
The USPS is ad supported. They invented spam.
Aunt Agatha's letter is ended by junk mail.
Aunt Agatha's letter is ended by junk mail.
If non customer complaints and responses threaten the ability of the organization to sell to their actual customers, they will respond. Short of that line, the business is not going to be responsive to non-customer complaints.
This is particularly relevant for subscription vs. ad companies, because both of these companies have different kinds of “non customers”. For a subscription company non-customers can be induced to convert into customers via sales, advertising, and features. So for these companies non customers are all potential future customers who should be listened to some. For companies like Google they serve an entire different class of customers. As an individual there is literally nothing you can do to become a Google customer; so unless if your complaints interfere with Google’s ability to sell your attention to their actual customers, then they have zero reason to care about your opinion.
This is particularly relevant for subscription vs. ad companies, because both of these companies have different kinds of “non customers”. For a subscription company non-customers can be induced to convert into customers via sales, advertising, and features. So for these companies non customers are all potential future customers who should be listened to some. For companies like Google they serve an entire different class of customers. As an individual there is literally nothing you can do to become a Google customer; so unless if your complaints interfere with Google’s ability to sell your attention to their actual customers, then they have zero reason to care about your opinion.
> unless your complaints interfere with [their bottom line], then they have zero reason to care about your opinion
Again, how are the incentives any different whether or not the business is funded by advertising?
Just like how Google knows that a user with a complaint isn't necessarily going to stop using their services and looking at their ads, Apple (for example) knows that a user with a complaint isn't necessarily going to stop buying iPhones.
In that sense I don't see why a "customer" who is paying in ad impressions is any less of a "customer" than one who is paying in cash.
Again, how are the incentives any different whether or not the business is funded by advertising?
Just like how Google knows that a user with a complaint isn't necessarily going to stop using their services and looking at their ads, Apple (for example) knows that a user with a complaint isn't necessarily going to stop buying iPhones.
In that sense I don't see why a "customer" who is paying in ad impressions is any less of a "customer" than one who is paying in cash.
> Apple knows that a user with a complaint isn’t necessarily going to stop buying iPhones.
Nonsense. People switch to android all the time. Apple’s sales depend wholly on continuing to meet the needs of their customers and providing perceived value. If they fell behind Android in perceived value, or stopped producing what their paying customers want they would lose money. Relatively high switching costs dampens this a bit, but there’s no magic that keeps Apple customers buying apple products.
> I don’t see why a “customer” who is paying in ad impressions is any less of a “customer” than one who is paying in cash.
A “customer” who pays in ad impressions is, quite literally, not a customer. They’re a user, at best. The customer is the person who pays the business for a good or service, which in this case is the ad buyer. Google will try to make you happy insofar as it helps them get more money from their paying customers, but the moment there’s a conflict between between the needs of their users and the needs of their customers, the paying customers will always win.
Put more brutally, your relationship with Google has more in common with a cow’s relationship with Nike than a shoe owner’s relationship with Nike. Your attention is the product, as much as the cow’s leather is. Just as we don’t confuse good animal husbandry with a genuine interest in the cow’s long term well being, don’t confuse Google offering features & products as an interest in your productivity and/or happiness.
Nonsense. People switch to android all the time. Apple’s sales depend wholly on continuing to meet the needs of their customers and providing perceived value. If they fell behind Android in perceived value, or stopped producing what their paying customers want they would lose money. Relatively high switching costs dampens this a bit, but there’s no magic that keeps Apple customers buying apple products.
> I don’t see why a “customer” who is paying in ad impressions is any less of a “customer” than one who is paying in cash.
A “customer” who pays in ad impressions is, quite literally, not a customer. They’re a user, at best. The customer is the person who pays the business for a good or service, which in this case is the ad buyer. Google will try to make you happy insofar as it helps them get more money from their paying customers, but the moment there’s a conflict between between the needs of their users and the needs of their customers, the paying customers will always win.
Put more brutally, your relationship with Google has more in common with a cow’s relationship with Nike than a shoe owner’s relationship with Nike. Your attention is the product, as much as the cow’s leather is. Just as we don’t confuse good animal husbandry with a genuine interest in the cow’s long term well being, don’t confuse Google offering features & products as an interest in your productivity and/or happiness.
> there’s no magic that keeps Apple customers buying apple products.
So then what's the magic that keeps Google users using Google products if they stop producing what their non-paying, but ad-watching customers want?
If the answer is "anticompetitive practices", I don't deny that at all, but that has nothing to do with advertising as a revenue model. Just look at Microsoft, they have long been the champions of anticompetitive behaviour and yet they didn't really use advertising as a revenue model until recently.
> Google will try to make you happy insofar as it helps them get more money from their paying customers, but the moment there’s a conflict between between the needs of their users and the needs of their customers, the paying customers will always win.
The needs of the users are the needs of the paying customers, that is what I am saying. Without the users there is no opportunity to have paying customers, period.
> your relationship with Google has more in common with a cow’s relationship with Nike than a shoe owner’s relationship with Nike.
No, that is a totally misleading analogy and I think it perfectly demonstrates what is wrong with this argument. Users choose to use Google products in exchange for ad impressions.
So then what's the magic that keeps Google users using Google products if they stop producing what their non-paying, but ad-watching customers want?
If the answer is "anticompetitive practices", I don't deny that at all, but that has nothing to do with advertising as a revenue model. Just look at Microsoft, they have long been the champions of anticompetitive behaviour and yet they didn't really use advertising as a revenue model until recently.
> Google will try to make you happy insofar as it helps them get more money from their paying customers, but the moment there’s a conflict between between the needs of their users and the needs of their customers, the paying customers will always win.
The needs of the users are the needs of the paying customers, that is what I am saying. Without the users there is no opportunity to have paying customers, period.
> your relationship with Google has more in common with a cow’s relationship with Nike than a shoe owner’s relationship with Nike.
No, that is a totally misleading analogy and I think it perfectly demonstrates what is wrong with this argument. Users choose to use Google products in exchange for ad impressions.
> So then what's the magic that keeps Google users using Google products if they stop producing what their non-paying, but ad-watching customers want?
Free is one hell of a competitive advantage. And again, Google does enough to keep the customers coming back as much as the rancher does to help the cow grow. The rubber really hits the road when you consider customer's need for say, privacy.
Or, try and get Google to help you out if your account gets locked. Good luck. Now if you're having issues with your ad account, they'll happily hop on the phone to figure it out with you....
> The needs of the users are the needs of the paying customers, that is what I am saying. Without the users there is no opportunity to have paying customers, period.
An overlap in requirements is not the same thing as being the same thing. For a short while, the rancher meets the cows needs too.
> Users choose to use Google products in exchange for ad impressions.
Unclear. Users choose Google products because they're free, it's not obvious if they fully understand the implications of that, or if they see that they have a meaningful choice.
Free is one hell of a competitive advantage. And again, Google does enough to keep the customers coming back as much as the rancher does to help the cow grow. The rubber really hits the road when you consider customer's need for say, privacy.
Or, try and get Google to help you out if your account gets locked. Good luck. Now if you're having issues with your ad account, they'll happily hop on the phone to figure it out with you....
> The needs of the users are the needs of the paying customers, that is what I am saying. Without the users there is no opportunity to have paying customers, period.
An overlap in requirements is not the same thing as being the same thing. For a short while, the rancher meets the cows needs too.
> Users choose to use Google products in exchange for ad impressions.
Unclear. Users choose Google products because they're free, it's not obvious if they fully understand the implications of that, or if they see that they have a meaningful choice.
I use one streaming service, but always buy a CD when I like something. So many times I had no network connection and got stuck without anything to listen to. Streaming service had offline option, but couldn't play anything as it needed to check keys, which makes offline pointless. Sadly not all music is available in physical format.
Reddit recently limited the number of comments you can read in Safari on iOS devices. Click "more" and you are prompted to create an account or go to their app.
It's been fantastic. Reddit comments decrease rapidly in quality anyway, but I was unable to look away. Now I'm capped - one or two scrolls and I have to go find something more rewarding to do. Thanks reddit!
It's been fantastic. Reddit comments decrease rapidly in quality anyway, but I was unable to look away. Now I'm capped - one or two scrolls and I have to go find something more rewarding to do. Thanks reddit!
I had an iPHone for a few months and noticed my reddit time dropped considerably. Part of it was because iPhone (or Reddit? I don't even know who is to blame here) wouldn't let me choose the reddit app I wanted as the default. If a friend sent a reddit link to me it'd try and open in Safari and I'd get annoyed and just ignore it.
I'm back on Android now where I can choose default apps and now if a friend sends a link, I click it and read it, then I click over to the homepage, then 20 minutes goes by as I mindlessly scroll. It's a blessing and a curse to be able to use your phone the way you want to, I guess.
I'm back on Android now where I can choose default apps and now if a friend sends a link, I click it and read it, then I click over to the homepage, then 20 minutes goes by as I mindlessly scroll. It's a blessing and a curse to be able to use your phone the way you want to, I guess.
I browse Reddit on iPhone with Apollo. Free account, so can't post but can read anything there, and no ads. If they mess that up too, I'll give up on Reddit for the iPhone.
The integration in iOS is a bit different. With e.g. Apollo installed, you need to "Share" the Reddit page from Safari with the "Open in Apollo" target and it'll open in Apollo.
I only read reddit when a search engine tells me that the answer to a question is there. Sometimes I'm annoyed that I can't read further into a thread... but I tell myself that anything in the weeds probably won't be a great answer to my question anyway. If only search engines had voluntary "I found / didn't find what I was looking for" feedback instead of clickjacking trackers...
If you switch to old.reddit, you can see the entire thread without signup prompts. For now, at least.
A tech news website started limiting the length of RSS versions of their articles.
Major improvement, previously I couldn’t stop reading their bloated articles, now I just glance at a couple of most important facts and carry on.
Major improvement, previously I couldn’t stop reading their bloated articles, now I just glance at a couple of most important facts and carry on.
Hah, thanks for pointing this out. This cap always annoyed me but now I'll instead see it as a positive.
They're also doing an annoying then where you have a message if you don't have notifications turned on for the iOS app. If you turn them on, the 'message' goes away. But if you turn them back off, the message comes back! So annoying.
Same, haha. Funny thing is I am logged in, Reddit just logs me out too often for whatever reason and fails to relog.
Win-win, I guess.
Win-win, I guess.
HN has a similar feature, but it’s more of a bug
I've never seen that on HN. Reddit intentionally changed their website to prevent you from seeing comments after a couple replies without logging in.
I was making a joke about how some of the larger HN threads the replies span multiple pages and it's not immediately obvious you need to click a link to get to the next page of comments
I'm the same as you regarding reduced viewing time recently... unless I'm extremely motivated, I kill the tab as soon as the ad starts.
It's the same with sites that require javascript to view: I'm sure the content might be good if I whitelisted it - but most the time it's my cue to realize I'm procrastinating and should get back to creating rather than consuming!
It's the same with sites that require javascript to view: I'm sure the content might be good if I whitelisted it - but most the time it's my cue to realize I'm procrastinating and should get back to creating rather than consuming!
It heartens me to know that this sentiment is spreading.
I have some black and white rules set up for myself. The day Whatsapp stops encrypting chats is the day I jump ship. The day Youtube blocks access to those using uBlock, I'll stop going to Youtube. The day old.reddit.com and i.reddit.com stop working, sayonara Reddit.
I've come to realise that a) I just don't derive TOO much value from any of these websites/services, and b) I don't mind paying for value added.
I'd be happy to pay for Youtube. But not 15 dollars a _month_! Youtube is an amateur platform. Charge me maybe 3 dollars a month. 5 if I'm feeling generous. But not 15. And certainly not when it's bundled with Google tracking the living bejeesus out of me.
I have some black and white rules set up for myself. The day Whatsapp stops encrypting chats is the day I jump ship. The day Youtube blocks access to those using uBlock, I'll stop going to Youtube. The day old.reddit.com and i.reddit.com stop working, sayonara Reddit.
I've come to realise that a) I just don't derive TOO much value from any of these websites/services, and b) I don't mind paying for value added.
I'd be happy to pay for Youtube. But not 15 dollars a _month_! Youtube is an amateur platform. Charge me maybe 3 dollars a month. 5 if I'm feeling generous. But not 15. And certainly not when it's bundled with Google tracking the living bejeesus out of me.
WhatsApp encrypts your chats, but if that key is 'backed up' for you to anywhere, it's still game over. There's also the fact that they were clearly worth billions to Facebook, and yet had no meaningful monetization play.
Signal (https://signal.org) is an awesome WhatsApp replacement BTW - end to end encrypted, open source, and run by a nonprofit.
Yup. Already using it with anyone who will bother with it.
I deleted Facebook way back when, on the basis that anyone who couldn't be bothered to find me via another route probably didn't care that much for me to begin with. Will happily apply the same principle for Whatsapp. Parents etc. can just call me the old-fashioned way :)
I deleted Facebook way back when, on the basis that anyone who couldn't be bothered to find me via another route probably didn't care that much for me to begin with. Will happily apply the same principle for Whatsapp. Parents etc. can just call me the old-fashioned way :)
In my opinion YouTube Music is more than good enough to be compared to Spotify and the other music streaming services, and paying for YouTube Music gets you YouTube Premium (no ads).
I've always preferred Google Play Music/YouTube Music to Spotify so I'd be paying for it anyways but getting adless YouTube along with it makes it a great value, for me.
I also don't know if I particularly agree with your characterization of YouTube as an amateur outlet nowadays, since there's just SO MUCH MONEY in some of the channels.
I've always preferred Google Play Music/YouTube Music to Spotify so I'd be paying for it anyways but getting adless YouTube along with it makes it a great value, for me.
I also don't know if I particularly agree with your characterization of YouTube as an amateur outlet nowadays, since there's just SO MUCH MONEY in some of the channels.
>I also don't know if I particularly agree with your characterization of YouTube as an amateur outlet nowadays
Yes, YouTube is an amateur outlet for sure, at least the majority of it, just see how many worthless information and popular advices there is in the platform.
Yes, YouTube is an amateur outlet for sure, at least the majority of it, just see how many worthless information and popular advices there is in the platform.
15 is way to much.
"After all, it's their platform and they're not running a charity - people often forget that it's not their birth right to use a company's product or a service without paying for it one way or another."
A few more consumer perspectives:
Google still does not own the videos. It is still not their content. They will not pay contributors for content.
As someone who has been using the web since 1993 I can assure anyone reading that there would still be widepspread video sharing on the internet even if no company such as YouTube existed that tried to monetise the phenomenon. Consumers pay dearly for internet connectivity and bandwidth, many of them enjoy playing around with the internet for fun and they will use the network for all manner of data sharing, including video, even in the absence of advertisers and their service partners (who are usurping a significant portion of that user-financed bandwidth).
Google may not be running a tax-exempt charity for the benefit of consumers, however they are running a corporate welfare program for over 75,000 people. (Nevermind the amount the corporation pays in tax.) This will change if and when profits start to drop.
With respect to this announcement, it appears Google won't share the proceeds from ad sales unless the YouTube contributor's video meets a certain threshhold of traffic, enough to be in the so-called "Partner Program". Many video contributors will receive nothing despite their viewers having to suffer though pre-roll and other ads interrupting their "user experience". In a way this reminds me of domain name registrars that place ads at domain names that customers fail to renew.
I absolutely agree with this comment though. Changes such as this are evolutionary pressure that may lead us to a better internet, one that is less commercially driven by advertising under the fiction of "free". No matter how large these websites, excuse me, "platforms", have become I still believe the web and the internet are meant to be non-commercial and user-driven. As the network has grown, most users are not corporations.
Add more straw. Break the camel's back. What comes in the aftermath will surely be better.
A few more consumer perspectives:
Google still does not own the videos. It is still not their content. They will not pay contributors for content.
As someone who has been using the web since 1993 I can assure anyone reading that there would still be widepspread video sharing on the internet even if no company such as YouTube existed that tried to monetise the phenomenon. Consumers pay dearly for internet connectivity and bandwidth, many of them enjoy playing around with the internet for fun and they will use the network for all manner of data sharing, including video, even in the absence of advertisers and their service partners (who are usurping a significant portion of that user-financed bandwidth).
Google may not be running a tax-exempt charity for the benefit of consumers, however they are running a corporate welfare program for over 75,000 people. (Nevermind the amount the corporation pays in tax.) This will change if and when profits start to drop.
With respect to this announcement, it appears Google won't share the proceeds from ad sales unless the YouTube contributor's video meets a certain threshhold of traffic, enough to be in the so-called "Partner Program". Many video contributors will receive nothing despite their viewers having to suffer though pre-roll and other ads interrupting their "user experience". In a way this reminds me of domain name registrars that place ads at domain names that customers fail to renew.
I absolutely agree with this comment though. Changes such as this are evolutionary pressure that may lead us to a better internet, one that is less commercially driven by advertising under the fiction of "free". No matter how large these websites, excuse me, "platforms", have become I still believe the web and the internet are meant to be non-commercial and user-driven. As the network has grown, most users are not corporations.
Add more straw. Break the camel's back. What comes in the aftermath will surely be better.
20 second unskippable ads about cat food (I don't have a cat) to watch a 1 minute video.
No thanks YouTube!
No thanks YouTube!
It's worse when you have no idea if you're even _interested_ in the video you're going to sit through two unskippable ads to watch. It degrades the experience considerably.
I used to use the YouTube app on my firestick to stream music while working around the house. One of my favorite bands - who I personally know and who don't put any ads on their videos - releases entire albums in a single 30-40 minute long video.
YouTube now throws 4-6 ads in the middle of the videos, often right in the middle of the songs.
YouTube now throws 4-6 ads in the middle of the videos, often right in the middle of the songs.
It's worse when you are trying to put a soothing music to put your baby to sleep and it starts with a loud ad which wakes her up. Or now that she is a toddler, her nursery rhyme videos have political campaign ads in the middle of the song.
Of course, many of those nursery rhymes were political ads originally.
Little Donny Trumpet went out on a junket, swatting his golf balls away...
Little Donny Trumpet went out on a junket, swatting his golf balls away...
One of the best things about the ads on youtube was that if they sucked or weren't relevant you could skip them, sending a signal that the ads should not be shown.
I suspect that the platforms have started to realize that personalized ads aren't better than content relevant ads, because I have several times seen ads on Facebook that were just targeted to people who live in my country and are over the age of 18, ie not targeted at all. Yet Facebook presumably showed me those ads because that is what they thought would make them the most money.
I suspect that the platforms have started to realize that personalized ads aren't better than content relevant ads, because I have several times seen ads on Facebook that were just targeted to people who live in my country and are over the age of 18, ie not targeted at all. Yet Facebook presumably showed me those ads because that is what they thought would make them the most money.
Watch the ads, start the video, pause the video for a few minutes, come back and get shown fresh ads.
I pay for YT Premium and worth it to skip all ads and be able to listen to audio in app on background.
I use it a lot for recipes and great to have a corner of the internet totally ad free now.
I use it a lot for recipes and great to have a corner of the internet totally ad free now.
If you want that corner to be expanded to the full internet, install ublock origin.
YT Premium still supports creators while Ublock Origin denies creators one of the easiest ways to be compensated for their work. That's a pretty big difference.
True, though most of the videos I watch these days either have explicit sponsor mentions, or I support though patreon. My general feel on adblock is that it is a reasonable step against an abusive advertising industry. That it harms creators is the side effect of the advertising industry's overreach, and is not a moral fault of the end user for acting in self-defense.
Nevermind the fact that for the vast majority of creators, their advertising revenue is 100% up to the whims of some bullshit black box "AI" algorithm on whether they are worthy of money they earned or not.
Most of the valuable youtube creators don't care much about their ad revenue and prefer to curate out of band sponsorships and patreon. And if I wanted to actually support them, I'd invest in them through patreon, not watch an atrocious ad that will likely give them 30% of 5 cents
Most of the valuable youtube creators don't care much about their ad revenue and prefer to curate out of band sponsorships and patreon. And if I wanted to actually support them, I'd invest in them through patreon, not watch an atrocious ad that will likely give them 30% of 5 cents
You wrote something that is completely obvious to anyone but some how its surprising what little thought I had put into it... I'm calling it: "Employed by robots" because it goes well with the "Trial by robots". Just those 2 make for "Governed by robots".
We still have some humans in the board room who could theoretically switch things off just like the switched them on but its somewhat naive to think their job description allows for it.
This leaves only governments. I could see myself write government automation even while fully aware of the above. If the pay is right, nice coworkers, interesting stack. ~rolls eyes~
We still have some humans in the board room who could theoretically switch things off just like the switched them on but its somewhat naive to think their job description allows for it.
This leaves only governments. I could see myself write government automation even while fully aware of the above. If the pay is right, nice coworkers, interesting stack. ~rolls eyes~
I use the YT iOS app mostly. can’t skip it there.
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Nothing stops you from doing both, in fact, I think that it's the best of both worlds.
The point is there usually isn't a premium service for sites blocked by UBO. So doing just YT Premium with UBO for other sites would only entrench YT and deny creators on other services a significant source of income.
Maybe if advertisements don't work for them, and the subscriptions work for YouTube, they'll roll out subscriptions too. But to be honest, I just hate advertisements, and so I'll block them, and I'll also subscribe where I can because I want to give back something too.
It's why I use NewPipe, for free
I feel the same way about Twitch. They recently added unblockable, unskippable ads unless you subscribe to the specific channel that you're watching and I just don't watch Twitch any more for the most part. It's especially annoying when it's the same few ads in rotation over and over for products that I will never be interested in.
It doesn't help that the ads on Twitch are the lowest of the low in terms of quality so you have no desire to stay around. Also their way of doing preroll ads is just bad, you'll get to watch like 5-10 seconds of the channel before the ad just suddenly cuts it off, unlike YouTube or others where the ad is shown first then the content after.
I've noticed the same. When I go looking for some video on youtube, I first pause, prepare my query in my mind and then open youtube & rush to type what I prepared, sift quickly and try to find what I'm looking for, then close the tab/quit the app when I'm done. It's the same feeling as dashing into a hostile store trying to upsell you on stuff and waste your time, when all you needed is 1 thing.
For actual video hosting, assuming ad revenue is not desired, Vimeo seems pretty good.
For actual video hosting, assuming ad revenue is not desired, Vimeo seems pretty good.
I find it hilarious that YouTube's iOS app is always pushing me to try a trial of their premium product, one of the major selling points being that videos continue to play in the background when you close the app.
When, in fact, closing the app is the most reliable way to get YouTube to stop playing. From inadvertent clicks in the Wrong Place on the screen that launch some crap or play some ad, to autoplay, as soon as my content is over, I can't wait to kill the app and make it all stop. It's a hell of a lot easier than finding pause/stop.
When, in fact, closing the app is the most reliable way to get YouTube to stop playing. From inadvertent clicks in the Wrong Place on the screen that launch some crap or play some ad, to autoplay, as soon as my content is over, I can't wait to kill the app and make it all stop. It's a hell of a lot easier than finding pause/stop.
Maybe this explains why its become frustratingly difficult for me to quickly close the app on Android.
These ads do something to my mindset that really puts me in a bad place. I used to spend hours on youtube. I loved watching videos related to my hobbies etc. Now, it seems like a chore.
That's a very good point! Add to that YT's abysmal organization of subscribed channels and their terrible recommendation engine. I have to say I really like it.
I have to agree about the recommendation engine. I know there is a lot of interesting new content that I might be interested in uploaded every day, but for some reason it's recommending years old videos that I've already watched AND voted on. WTF?!
Yes! I am regularly in the mood to watch something on YouTube - mostly new documentaries on societal/political subjects. But I just can't find anything relevant. Also the search function is critically handicapped. It's really frustrating. They are not increasing my time on YouTube, they reduce it.
The recommendation engine was intentionally crippled because it was radicalizing people who were into conspiracy theories, militias, terroristic acts, etc. It sucks but I assume there's some work being done to get a new engine out without sending people down a rabbit hole.
For that I actually have a nice observation:
I always clear my cookies and website data on browser quit, and never login into Youtube. Which means I get a pretty vanilla "recommendation" experience, additional tracking attempts from Google put aside.
Visiting youtube, I could swear that the recommendations Youtube is trying to shove my way only change after several weeks or sometimes even months, it is always the same 8 videos on top of the front page for very long periods.
It starts to get somewhat relevant after I watch something, but then it looks like their recommendation engine does nothing more than "Recommend to user x the n most popular videos of roughly the same category as the last video user x watched" with a little bit of shuffling 1-3 videos from a larger set between those, sometimes, and that appears to be it.
Visiting youtube, I could swear that the recommendations Youtube is trying to shove my way only change after several weeks or sometimes even months, it is always the same 8 videos on top of the front page for very long periods.
It starts to get somewhat relevant after I watch something, but then it looks like their recommendation engine does nothing more than "Recommend to user x the n most popular videos of roughly the same category as the last video user x watched" with a little bit of shuffling 1-3 videos from a larger set between those, sometimes, and that appears to be it.
I don't believe that. They could have restricted this to problematic videos which promote conspiracy theories and their likes.
I’m subscribed to an old channel, with 200 videos that need to be watched in order. They are all long enough that I have to stop at least once in the middle, sometimes as many as 3 times. If I come back or switch devices, I have to go to my history to find the video I was watching, because recommendations either get the previous or next videos half the time.
Maybe if they add a few more crappy features I can avoid YT altogether!
Unfortunately, most of my YouTube viewing is not recreational/ entertainment. I use YouTube primarily for DIY videos, Home Building, and other similar educational/ Howto videos. I just don't see a lot of alternatives out there so I'm kind of stuck with YouTube.
Preroll ads are the worst because quality varies so widely I end up wading through multiple ads for crappy videos.
Is there a good resource for how-tos out there for a fee?
Preroll ads are the worst because quality varies so widely I end up wading through multiple ads for crappy videos.
Is there a good resource for how-tos out there for a fee?
Ad-free youtube is $10/mo. I get the impression from patreon and Consumer Reports that a lot of monthly services expect people to sign up and quit as needed.
Honestly, sounds like a VPN in a small country would work great. Just tunnel through Moldova and enjoy a better Youtube and even Internet experience haha... Or just pay for premium...
Most YT videos have transcriptions generated for them, maybe instead of wading through the video itself, you can skim the transcript?
Unfortunately, I use YoutubeVanced to block ads on my Android. Background playback is a plus. No root required.
https://vancedapp.com/
https://vancedapp.com/
For anyone not familiar, Vanced is hacked Google binaries. It's the YouTube app, but with features enabled for free and ads blocked. They've been around a long time and are active on XDA.
I use Vanced on my phone, but if you're not into hacked binaries, NewPipe is what you want: https://newpipe.schabi.org/
I use Vanced on my phone, but if you're not into hacked binaries, NewPipe is what you want: https://newpipe.schabi.org/
There's the risk that Google will ban your account as it has done previously to some users, losing access and data hosted in their ecosystem (Gmail, Docs...), that's the thing that scares me the most. But yeah, Vanced (and the new YT Music) is amazing.
I guess the solution here is to not use your main Google account with youtube vanced?
I looked this up. This seems to be fear mongering. There are no confirmed cases of stuff like this happening. Too lazy to dig up the links, but go search for yourself. (Reports in YTVanced reddit and NewPipe github)
Use NewPipe on Android to avoid ads
Serious question, what's the risk of losing your Gmail account?
Newpipe is available from F-Droid and does not have a sign-in option. There's no Google account involved.
The APK from F-Droid has been pretty broken for the last month, and for some reason isn't getting updated. Anyone thinking of trying out F-Droid should just grab the latest release from the GitHub repo.
D'oh, I meant "trying out NewPipe".
You don't need to login with newpipe
Sadly their new UI is unusable on Android TV (nvidia Shield)
> on either my phone or my tablet (where I don't have access to AdBlock)
I think it's amazing you're putting up with devices that work against you. If my phone would force me to watch ads I would get a new phone tomorrow.
I wish I could say the same thing. In my younger years, I was pretty hardcore about hacking devices and having complete control of them. But SO MUCH TIME was spent debugging issues and staying ahead of the "bad guys." And I couldn't count the literally years of time I've spent fixing broken devices.
Nowadays I just don't have that time. And the bad guys have evolved from mischievous to felonious (and I have a lot more to lose. I still harp on privacy and security, but now I do it behind a couple of walled gardens. I love that my devices "just work."
I know it's a trade off, and I'm certainly fighting for more regulations of FAANG. And I am supporting the FOSS/open device movement, and look forward to the next phase where those "just work".
Nowadays I just don't have that time. And the bad guys have evolved from mischievous to felonious (and I have a lot more to lose. I still harp on privacy and security, but now I do it behind a couple of walled gardens. I love that my devices "just work."
I know it's a trade off, and I'm certainly fighting for more regulations of FAANG. And I am supporting the FOSS/open device movement, and look forward to the next phase where those "just work".
I will never harp on privacy and security behind a couple of walled gardens. It is a wasted effort.
Your phone doesn't force you to watch ads. Youtube (which has nothing to do with your phone) forces you to watch ads (if you don't have an adblocker)
Youtube doesn't force you to watch ads. Pay for Youtube Premium and you will see no ads.
Thats sounds a lot like extorsion.
Restaurants extort me to pay for food if I want to eat there. It's shameful.
I would not say that if youtube straight up asked for payment for their product and there were no ads.
Instead, Youtube is pestering you with ads and asking for payment to stop doing so.
Instead, Youtube is pestering you with ads and asking for payment to stop doing so.
A big difference I see is how much money does Google make me "watching"/skipping ads in a month? I find it hard to believe it's around $10/month. What are rates now a days?
Paying for something not to happen is different than paying for something in return. Obviously.
Ah no you pay the content creators by watching the ads with your time or the subscription.
> Restaurants extort me to pay for food if I want to eat there.
> Paying for something not to happen is different than paying for something in return.
The rough metaphor about restaurants, is not an equivalent situation.
---
> you pay the content creators by watching the ads with your time or the subscription
To clarify, you believe that there is an ephemeral currency of attention.
Your attention (which was to be directed at the content creator) can be redirected forcefully, unless you pay in money. I'd be remiss to call it outright extortion, but the parallel is there.
> Paying for something not to happen is different than paying for something in return.
The rough metaphor about restaurants, is not an equivalent situation.
---
> you pay the content creators by watching the ads with your time or the subscription
To clarify, you believe that there is an ephemeral currency of attention.
Your attention (which was to be directed at the content creator) can be redirected forcefully, unless you pay in money. I'd be remiss to call it outright extortion, but the parallel is there.
Let them eat ads.
You know what they say. If you're not paying for the product, then you probably are the product.
In the cases of both youtube and reddit, how would one suggest they pay for the developers, and their massive hosting costs? If not ad revenue, then what? Subscriptions? That's a hard veto from a high percentage of users.
Your phone doesn't allow you to run a browser that would let you use an adblocker.
Android has Firefox which has uBlock, as well as Firefox Focus. iOS has VPN based ad blocking compatible with Safari, I use AdGuard.
Or Musi for watching YT videos. Ad-free!
I don’t see any ads in Safari with Wipr.
How do you handle driving on roads with billboards? Or walking through a city? In most of the US, the number of outdoor places you can go without advertising attacking you is dwindling. Europe seems better regarding roads (fewer billboards and more highways with none) but similar in cities.
The rise of blindingly bright LED billboards in the US feels like all the downsides of a sci-fi dystopian world without any of the upside like self-driving hover cars.
The rise of blindingly bright LED billboards in the US feels like all the downsides of a sci-fi dystopian world without any of the upside like self-driving hover cars.
Actually, most billboards around the roads in Czech Republic are being dismantled due to being too startling to drivers - the advertisers fought it quite hard, even placed big Czech flags instead of adds to the billboards due to some provision in the law saying you can't just remove a flag of the country. But the ultimately list and billboards around roads are going away.
Also more thought is now being given to "visual pollution" where unsightly advertising is bastardising valuable architecture in cities.
Hopefully both initiatives will proliferate alse to other countries. :)
Also more thought is now being given to "visual pollution" where unsightly advertising is bastardising valuable architecture in cities.
Hopefully both initiatives will proliferate alse to other countries. :)
Good to hear :). I think in the US some places must be much worse than others. Here in Portland, Oregon, on a 7 mile round trip (without much overlap) through the urban core that I make regularly by bike I only see maybe four billboards, and all but one (a not too large sign of a stadium that mostly advertises events there) are the traditional paper type (or whatever it is that they use). Most are near highways or highway access so I assume anyone who uses highways regularly will see more of them. There are also some small advertisements (also not LCD) on bus shelters, although there aren't many bus shelters. I rarely notice any of them unless I am stopped at a traffic light near one. It took me a while to even remember most of them. I'd still prefer fewer of them, but it isn't at all comparable to using the web without an adblocker. Additionally, there is no chance that the billboards will install malware on my computer.
There's a fundamental difference between a billboard that is just sort of in your field of view as you walk down a street, and a billboard which blocks your path, not letting you continue on your way until you finish reading it from top to bottom.
newpipe has the nicest youtube interface and doesn't show ads.
It’s not a charity, but it’s also the standard platform bait and switch: provide years of great service to capture users and creators and gain network effects, then turn on the users and content creators to exploit them after there are no alternatives. Where else do we go now? When YouTube went down the other day, billions of people stopped being able to watch most online videos for a while
Interestingly this will probably mess up google search results as well. There are so many things in youtube that should have been a text post but are videos on youtube (for example how to do something technical), that somehow mysteriously come out as top results on google search. They've been rendered even more useless than they were before. I'm already not willing to sit through a video if it could have been text, but I'm sure some people are. I wonder if a slate of ads before, and during, will kill of that type of content.
Honestly, I consider the existence of such things kind of toxic, which is a weirdly extreme view, I admit, so I'm kinda rooting for these types of videos to get pushed out of the results.
Honestly, I consider the existence of such things kind of toxic, which is a weirdly extreme view, I admit, so I'm kinda rooting for these types of videos to get pushed out of the results.
> I consume all video content on either my phone or my tablet (where I don't have access to AdBlock)
If you're on a network you control, you can do network level ad blocking :-)
https://pi-hole.net/
If you're on a network you control, you can do network level ad blocking :-)
https://pi-hole.net/
My trick for this is to disable the Youtube app on my phone and only use the browser to watch videos. Combined with DNS66, the few ads that do make it through on the site can be dismissed by just refreshing the page, which is easy to do in my browser.
This also works on iOS and you can even get a shortcut to let you bypass PIP being disabled and by pausing the video 2-3 times in picture mode you bug it out and can play the video with the screen off - not very convenient for short videos but longer ones it works well with.
You can use Kiwi browser of phone. It's basically Chrome + dark mode + extensions(so ublock). Nothing makes it through.
On Android use Youtube Vanced and you won't see any ads. vanced.app
> I consume all video content on either my phone or my tablet
I dunno which mobile platform you are using but I use iOS and if you watch YT via the browser you can block ads with its content blocker and you can even use some JavaScript in an shortcut to re-enable picture in picture (it’s a little more of a hassle, you have to press share then the pip custom shortcut but it works).
I dunno which mobile platform you are using but I use iOS and if you watch YT via the browser you can block ads with its content blocker and you can even use some JavaScript in an shortcut to re-enable picture in picture (it’s a little more of a hassle, you have to press share then the pip custom shortcut but it works).
On the other hand, it makes it harder to filter out bad content.
When i search for a video on some language/system architecture, it's often difficult to find the official team videos. One good thing to do is to start playing one video after another form the search results. Usually the very first one without a pre-roll Advertisement, is the one you want.
When i search for a video on some language/system architecture, it's often difficult to find the official team videos. One good thing to do is to start playing one video after another form the search results. Usually the very first one without a pre-roll Advertisement, is the one you want.
Biggest issue for me is less the time cost and more the disruption created by an ad in the middle of a video. It's maybe 10% as valuable to me to watch a 10-minute video with two ad breaks in the middle vs a 10-minute video with ads at the start. It's like trying to watch a TV show while someone is throwing axes at your head.
This sounds like a win-win for Youtube. Only the people willing to pay (via YT premium or watch ads) will stick around.
> I consume all video content on either my phone or my tablet (where I don't have access to AdBlock)
There's a simple trick to get around this: don't use the YouTube app, use the website youtube.com. Adblockers work for YouTube's website on iOS.
The app is only marginally better than the website, so you won't be missing much.
There's a simple trick to get around this: don't use the YouTube app, use the website youtube.com. Adblockers work for YouTube's website on iOS.
The app is only marginally better than the website, so you won't be missing much.
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> I find the amount of ads I have to go through to watch a video so annoying that I'd rather not watch it at all.
Could you share what that amount is? One ad every how many minutes? I ask because I suspect that it depends on the geographic region of the user and other factors, and I’m curious how bad it is in some places.
Could you share what that amount is? One ad every how many minutes? I ask because I suspect that it depends on the geographic region of the user and other factors, and I’m curious how bad it is in some places.
This is exactly what I had in mind, I will definitely gain more time doing other things. With their recommendation engines youtube was already turning into cable television and now there's no escape from it.
This will also incentive us to find other methods of sharing/consuming. P2P perhaps?
This will also incentive us to find other methods of sharing/consuming. P2P perhaps?
As a sidenote, you can consider using Firefox on Android with adblock and works like a charm :)
I have posted tutorials and art on YouTube since before they were Google.
I am also glad that this move has finally given me the push needed to delete my channel entirely. I don't try to make money off it, I have no interest in Google getting to.
I am also glad that this move has finally given me the push needed to delete my channel entirely. I don't try to make money off it, I have no interest in Google getting to.
I had the same issue with YouTube ads on mobile. There's an open source YouTube app called Vanced (yes, with out "Ad") which runs exactly like the official YouTube app but you have the choice to turn off ads.
I understand that I can’t really complain about a service I don’t pay for. That’s fine. I just don’t use it, and my life is so much better for it! Besides, YouTube is blocked at work / on vpn anyway :)
There's a chrome extension which blows away the recommendations sidebar in YouTube. For me, installing that was enough to break any mindless video watching.
This has been the same for me, although I do find for content created by others, there should at least be a monetization split.
Use Brave browser, or Firefox with uBlockOrigin.
Kiwi Browser is the best nowadays. You can install any Chome extension on it.
Have you considered paying for YouTube Premium?
This was my first thought as well. Both coursera and audiobooks are not free or ad-supported. Would these paid alternatives be as attractive if they had ad-supported options?
I watch more youtube than any other video platform and I am happy to pay the $13/month to be ad free. Is it a sustainable business model? That’s for the bean counters at Alphabet to know. For now, I am content.
I watch more youtube than any other video platform and I am happy to pay the $13/month to be ad free. Is it a sustainable business model? That’s for the bean counters at Alphabet to know. For now, I am content.
I was happily a subscriber, but like most things Google does, they decided to switch things up for the sake of different. What I don't like about paying $18/mo for Youtube (family) is that they are still collecting truckloads of data about me and using it to target MORE advertisements.
If I pay for a service, it my expectation that you provide me a way to opt out of your additional revenue opportunities. To that end, $18/mo for premium is gouging, in my mind. The fact that Youtube is implementing even more ads tells me the service is bleeding customers or cash, maybe both, and Google is handling this by making the barriers HIGHER.
Google has their hooks deep enough into most people - charge $3.99/mo for an ad-free experience and grow the subscriber base.
If I pay for a service, it my expectation that you provide me a way to opt out of your additional revenue opportunities. To that end, $18/mo for premium is gouging, in my mind. The fact that Youtube is implementing even more ads tells me the service is bleeding customers or cash, maybe both, and Google is handling this by making the barriers HIGHER.
Google has their hooks deep enough into most people - charge $3.99/mo for an ad-free experience and grow the subscriber base.
From their POV it's perfectly reasonable - by paying, you showed you have the money thus you're very worthy target for more ads and tracking!
I see people loudly complaining about it. I don’t watch YouTube. I went from a paying customer to ditching it entirely. But clearly everyone complaining love YouTube and are watching hours and hours of video. So why not pay for it? It’s more sustainable in the long run.
Until they decide to show you ads, anyway?
Damn, that's a strawman I haven't seen before. How about we discuss it when it happens, not before?
so unsubscribe then you are paying subscription month to month its not a one time fee.
You have to pick and choose among them and the million other subscriptions though and they aren't the cheapest. If you watch it enough then I suppose it makes sense. Let's just go back to cable with one known cost.
Let's not. Because there's still ads bundled into that cable-model "cost". Anything I can do to get rid of that is a blessing.
Exactly my thought. As much as I hate advertising and Google business practices, I would rather pay to avoid advertisements if that is an option. For $15/month family plan for 6 users, I find it to be a reasonable deal.
Currently in the US, YT Premium (Family) is $17.99/month.
> $17.99/month
That... is quite steep as compared to India, where the family plan for YT Premium (if I recall correctly) costs Rs. 99/month, approximately $1.33/month. PPP is real :|
That... is quite steep as compared to India, where the family plan for YT Premium (if I recall correctly) costs Rs. 99/month, approximately $1.33/month. PPP is real :|
I was grandfathered from Google music family plan for same old price of $15 + tax. I am not aware of current price for new subscribers.
I do this. Its not cheap (12$ month), but it comes with "youtube music", which I'm starting to use a bit. like all things google, its a little difficult to figure out exactly what is going on.
I signed up for Red a few weeks ago and cancelled my Spotify account. Ad-free videos, offline vides and a reasonable music service. I think it's a great deal.
> Its not cheap (12$ month)
How much is a cinema ticket these days?
How much is a cinema ticket these days?
I pay for Youtube premium and that's not a comparison I had even considered.
The ad supported web has led to so many people feeling entitled to consume content for free. People have gone so far to feel that the ads themselves are the problem, without realizing that without them, you would have to begin to pay the real cost of the service.
Funny how so many people find watching a single movie (lets say you watch cheap, $8) for two hours acceptable, but unlimited access to billions of hours of content for $10 is unacceptable.
The ad supported web has led to so many people feeling entitled to consume content for free. People have gone so far to feel that the ads themselves are the problem, without realizing that without them, you would have to begin to pay the real cost of the service.
Funny how so many people find watching a single movie (lets say you watch cheap, $8) for two hours acceptable, but unlimited access to billions of hours of content for $10 is unacceptable.
so you don't use ad blocker I see :/
They work today, but Google could fool them by embedding the ads in videos, I mean cutting a video and inserting the ad inside, not playing a separate segment, so that it can't be detected by the adblockers. But then video makers could fight back by using AI to compare it with the original without ads and distributing cue lists automatically downloadable by browsers extensions telling the player to skip from A to B to hide the ad. then Google would fight back again by making the ad embedding random at each play, so that cue lists wouldn't work anymore, or disabling skipping within the ad segment, and so on. It will never end.
It is pretty clear that Google is attempting to monetize everything down to the spaces between zeros and ones, changing their own rules when it suits them, and won't stop before anything. This is extremely unprofessional; I wouldn't rely on them for anything serious.
It is pretty clear that Google is attempting to monetize everything down to the spaces between zeros and ones, changing their own rules when it suits them, and won't stop before anything. This is extremely unprofessional; I wouldn't rely on them for anything serious.
You just showed me that I can block ads on YouTube. I just tried it and so far it seems to be working great. Thank you!
1Blocker on iOS does a great job of handling ads, but you raise a good point - perhaps I should whitelist Youtube :p
For me, it's the opposite - I'm very close to paying for youtube premium and not have ads anymore.
You can use ublock origin in Firefox on Android phones.
and there's also bromite with built-in adblocking
koonsolo(1)
Since discovering Musi [1] I don't see any YT ads on iOS.. it's a game changer!
[1] https://twitter.com/feelthemusi
[1] https://twitter.com/feelthemusi
I get why people are mad that something that exists is changing, though at this point I've stopped being surprised when something that was free either stops being free or has the free offering diminished. This particularly was a very weird setup where if you didn't want a share of ad revenue, you got to use the service completely for free. While Google offers ad free YouTube to users, it'd be nice if they offered a way for creators to pay for YouTube hosting so they can continue to offer their channels ad free, with maybe a small discount based on the percentage of your user base with YouTube Premium.
>it'd be nice if they offered a way for creators to pay for YouTube hosting so they can continue to offer their channels ad free
This.
I work with a small art organization, and we've started to put our artists videos online (we couldn't have an event this year). Youtube makes it easy. but like flickr they put ads in and there is no way to get rid of them. If we could pay for the service we probably would. I'm not sure how much it would be worth though.
This.
I work with a small art organization, and we've started to put our artists videos online (we couldn't have an event this year). Youtube makes it easy. but like flickr they put ads in and there is no way to get rid of them. If we could pay for the service we probably would. I'm not sure how much it would be worth though.
Vimeo serves the paid, ad-free video hosting niche. They're probably celebrating this latest announcement from YouTube.
YouTube has the advantage of organic traffic and discovery, though.
Nothing stopping you from uploading the video to both services for the best of both worlds.
YouTube has the advantage of organic traffic and discovery, though.
Nothing stopping you from uploading the video to both services for the best of both worlds.
This is like being on Play Store vs distributing the app yourself. You're paying a cut for the eyeballs and distribution Youtube provides.
The alternative would be for you to pay Google their share of money they would've made if they had ads enabled on your channel, which would be proportional to how many views your video gets. It makes sense since these channels have their own in-video ads which they make money from, and Youtube isn't getting a cut of that, it's similar to how app stores don't allow apps to have their own monetization which bypasses theirs.
That being said, having the creator payback Youtube depending on the number of views creates very weird incentives...
If they were harsher, they would've disallowed in-video ads completely and force channels to use Youtube ads.
The alternative would be for you to pay Google their share of money they would've made if they had ads enabled on your channel, which would be proportional to how many views your video gets. It makes sense since these channels have their own in-video ads which they make money from, and Youtube isn't getting a cut of that, it's similar to how app stores don't allow apps to have their own monetization which bypasses theirs.
That being said, having the creator payback Youtube depending on the number of views creates very weird incentives...
If they were harsher, they would've disallowed in-video ads completely and force channels to use Youtube ads.
Vimeo is great but keep in mind that it's blocked in some countries, which could be problematic if you want your video accessible in those countries.
This sort of thing needs to attract anti-competitive scrutiny at some point. Give away something for free, drive your competitors away, then raise prices is a text book anti-competitive move.
Don't forget that Google flat out just bought Youtube when they realized Google Video couldn't compete.
Yeah - good old dumping, but on the Internet.
youtube is still free
Then we need to change the definition of free: you do pay, you pay by watching ads.
You pay with your personal data and it is tax free for Google. This needs to be recognised as a loophole.
Not really though.
Discounting is fine, it's done everywhere.
It's 'anti competitive' usually only in the context of international trade rules, when government subsidies business units to 'dump' on other countries.
Changing your price over time for whatever reasons you want is generally fine unless you're price fixing or doing some kind of illegal type of price discrimination.
The competitive bit comes in more due to the fact that G runs chrome and search and therefore will favour their own products, that's much worse.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
Discounting is fine, it's done everywhere.
It's 'anti competitive' usually only in the context of international trade rules, when government subsidies business units to 'dump' on other countries.
Changing your price over time for whatever reasons you want is generally fine unless you're price fixing or doing some kind of illegal type of price discrimination.
The competitive bit comes in more due to the fact that G runs chrome and search and therefore will favour their own products, that's much worse.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
This is plainly incorrect. It's called "Predatory Pricing"[1] and it's illegal.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/predatory-pricing.asp
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/predatory-pricing.asp
No, making YouTube free, and then deciding 15 years later to adjust the policy for ads is not 'illegal'.
The amount of narrative promoting here on HN is distressing.
Google does some nice things, some not so much nice things.
Because they adjust their advertising policy doesn't make them either illegal actors or pariahs.
There's no evidence indication that this is 'predatory pricing'.
Again - if there is an issue, it's with their ownership of Search, Mobile towards prioritizing other products.
The amount of narrative promoting here on HN is distressing.
Google does some nice things, some not so much nice things.
Because they adjust their advertising policy doesn't make them either illegal actors or pariahs.
There's no evidence indication that this is 'predatory pricing'.
Again - if there is an issue, it's with their ownership of Search, Mobile towards prioritizing other products.
Yep. You don't own Youtube, and you don't really have much control over content you wish to upload, or content you wish the view. And, this content can be removed or modified (by inserting ads) at any time.
I think services are generally bad for consumers. (they can be quite good for businesses, though) If a consumer relies on a service, then they are beholden to any change made in that service. In other words, it's fine to enjoy Youtube, but just know that your enjoyment could be temporary, videos could be lost, and you could be shut out from the service.
I think services are generally bad for consumers. (they can be quite good for businesses, though) If a consumer relies on a service, then they are beholden to any change made in that service. In other words, it's fine to enjoy Youtube, but just know that your enjoyment could be temporary, videos could be lost, and you could be shut out from the service.
Completely agree the imbalance of the power dynamic has really gotten worse since the Reagan era.
We really need stronger consumer advocacy.
An aside- it's really jaded me that with the advent of the internet so many of us had these wonderful dreams of the things we could build and share the world over, and how it would change the world and be this revolutionary force. Well it was, just not for good. Every single good thing gets twisted and perverted in the hunt for the Almighty Profit.
I remember my father complaining when I was young about money being the root of all evil, never be greedy, love your fellow man. But some time around his late 40s he became a republican, tax became theft, people he didn't know personally could fuck right off. This all coincided with his opening his business and got worse as it became more successful.
The man who hated Reagan and Bush and my rich half of my family with a passion became a staunch Trump supporter.
We no longer speak for other reasons but I use it as a reminder of what not to be. It's worked well for me, I'm not an abusive alcoholic, hopefully I wont become a selfish old curmudgeon over money either.
We really need stronger consumer advocacy.
An aside- it's really jaded me that with the advent of the internet so many of us had these wonderful dreams of the things we could build and share the world over, and how it would change the world and be this revolutionary force. Well it was, just not for good. Every single good thing gets twisted and perverted in the hunt for the Almighty Profit.
I remember my father complaining when I was young about money being the root of all evil, never be greedy, love your fellow man. But some time around his late 40s he became a republican, tax became theft, people he didn't know personally could fuck right off. This all coincided with his opening his business and got worse as it became more successful.
The man who hated Reagan and Bush and my rich half of my family with a passion became a staunch Trump supporter.
We no longer speak for other reasons but I use it as a reminder of what not to be. It's worked well for me, I'm not an abusive alcoholic, hopefully I wont become a selfish old curmudgeon over money either.
You're singing my song. I really believed that information wanted to be free, and once people were exposed to it, they would become more free. But the information pool is being muddied, and that process is enriching technology companies. They were supposed to lead the charge to FREEDOM!
But power corrupts. And honestly, it all sounds so idealistic now. It has become painfully obvious that the companies will not self-regulate. We've got to do something.
But power corrupts. And honestly, it all sounds so idealistic now. It has become painfully obvious that the companies will not self-regulate. We've got to do something.
> you don't really have much control over content you wish to upload
Well, if it's your creative output, or public domain content, you are very much in control over what you do with it.
You are not in control over the available channels to distribute content, though, and that's the big challenge.
YouTube was a game changer because it allowed you to upload and share video for free... in an era where bandwidth and storage were prohibitively expensive. Combine that with every digital device having a camera and a mic, and you see how that led to an explosion of audiovisual content over the past 15 years.
However... bandwidth and storage are still prohibitively expensive. If you'd put up an MP4 in HD quality on shared hosting or a VPS, and amassed a couple of tens of thousands of views over several hours, your host would be really quick to either shut you down, and/or invoice you for the bandwidth you used.
Of course, there's no free lunch. Someone needs to pay. Showing ads to viewers is YouTube's strategy to recoup the expenses. Sadly, that diminishes the value of the content and it makes me less and less interested in opening up YouTube and clicking through a couple of short clips.
Personally, I feel that it's up to content creators to pay for the privilege of getting hosted. In that regard, Vimeo's offering is interesting. [1] No advertising and more features depending on your plan.
[1] https://vimeo.com/upgrade
Of course, doing that will impact your audience. In that regard, Vimeo isn't a social platform like it started, it's now more a B2B video platform, used by professional videographers or businesses who create professional video content.
The last option is paying for YouTube Premium. But do I really want to pay 11.99$ a month for a massive library of relatively short clips of inconsistent quality produced by third parties the majority of whom don't receive a worthwhile reimbursement through monetization? In that regard, YouTube isn't Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime or DisneyPlus because of this huge quality problem.
Finally, the original proposition of YouTube - being able to share video without restrictions - is what made it attractive for both content creators and consumers in the first place. Much like many other outlets that first appeared on the Web in the early 00's and followed that basic principle: offering information for free.
> I think services are generally bad for consumers.
Ultimately, the bigger issue is that hosting content never was free to begin with. Either you set up your own hardware and hook it to the network, or you lease it from someone else in some form (Serverless, VPS, shared hosting,...).
The notion of "posting" content online has completely abstracted that away. The proposition of being able post and share content for "free" is what made billions flock to the Web. Of course, that's entirely unsustainable.
Putting up paywalls everywhere and trying to sell monthly subscriptions does have its limits. Between Spotify, Backblaze, Netflix, VPS hosting, Dropbox, several newspapers,... there are only so many subscriptions that one can conceivable deduct from a monthy paycheck.
In that regard, a reckoning might be due once the limits of these business models are reached.
Well, if it's your creative output, or public domain content, you are very much in control over what you do with it.
You are not in control over the available channels to distribute content, though, and that's the big challenge.
YouTube was a game changer because it allowed you to upload and share video for free... in an era where bandwidth and storage were prohibitively expensive. Combine that with every digital device having a camera and a mic, and you see how that led to an explosion of audiovisual content over the past 15 years.
However... bandwidth and storage are still prohibitively expensive. If you'd put up an MP4 in HD quality on shared hosting or a VPS, and amassed a couple of tens of thousands of views over several hours, your host would be really quick to either shut you down, and/or invoice you for the bandwidth you used.
Of course, there's no free lunch. Someone needs to pay. Showing ads to viewers is YouTube's strategy to recoup the expenses. Sadly, that diminishes the value of the content and it makes me less and less interested in opening up YouTube and clicking through a couple of short clips.
Personally, I feel that it's up to content creators to pay for the privilege of getting hosted. In that regard, Vimeo's offering is interesting. [1] No advertising and more features depending on your plan.
[1] https://vimeo.com/upgrade
Of course, doing that will impact your audience. In that regard, Vimeo isn't a social platform like it started, it's now more a B2B video platform, used by professional videographers or businesses who create professional video content.
The last option is paying for YouTube Premium. But do I really want to pay 11.99$ a month for a massive library of relatively short clips of inconsistent quality produced by third parties the majority of whom don't receive a worthwhile reimbursement through monetization? In that regard, YouTube isn't Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime or DisneyPlus because of this huge quality problem.
Finally, the original proposition of YouTube - being able to share video without restrictions - is what made it attractive for both content creators and consumers in the first place. Much like many other outlets that first appeared on the Web in the early 00's and followed that basic principle: offering information for free.
> I think services are generally bad for consumers.
Ultimately, the bigger issue is that hosting content never was free to begin with. Either you set up your own hardware and hook it to the network, or you lease it from someone else in some form (Serverless, VPS, shared hosting,...).
The notion of "posting" content online has completely abstracted that away. The proposition of being able post and share content for "free" is what made billions flock to the Web. Of course, that's entirely unsustainable.
Putting up paywalls everywhere and trying to sell monthly subscriptions does have its limits. Between Spotify, Backblaze, Netflix, VPS hosting, Dropbox, several newspapers,... there are only so many subscriptions that one can conceivable deduct from a monthy paycheck.
In that regard, a reckoning might be due once the limits of these business models are reached.
Honestly I'm quite surprised that it happened not sooner, considering how may gigabytes of video are uploaded each day, of which only a fraction makes YouTube money.
In 2019 30,000 hours of content per hour was uploaded.
YouTube statistics are almost like astronomy when you try to comprehend how big the distances between planets are. 30k hours per hour!
I had to try a little math to put into perspective..
$ bc -l 365*24
about 8760 hours in a year. so year years worth of videos are uploaded in a hour. I think I'm falling further and further behind.. Much like my music consumptions and reading.
$ bc -l 365*24
about 8760 hours in a year. so year years worth of videos are uploaded in a hour. I think I'm falling further and further behind.. Much like my music consumptions and reading.
Edit: I just talked to YouTube support directly and yep it's exactly what I anticipated below. It only affects channels not yet in the YPP. Larger channels who are in the YPP but explicitly choose not to monetize videos will not get these new ads placed into their videos. At least not with this TOS change.
Original comment:
The wording of this isn't 100% crystal clear but I have a feeling this article might be making this out to be way worse than it is.
I have 10k subs on YouTube and made a decision not to run ads on my channel from the beginning because I care more about the viewing experience than profiting.
Technically I'm in the YouTube Partner Program and I choose not to turn on monetization for my videos. Monetization is basically a checkbox you can turn on and off for each video and then if you enable it, you choose some information about how the ads are shown.
Going by the TOS update's wording, it sounds like if you're in the YPP then your videos will have not have these new ads placed in them if you choose to disable monetization for a video.
It sounds like it's only going to affect channels who have a handful of subs and views, in which case you were making $0 guaranteed anyways because you couldn't turn monetization on due to not being in the YPP. The only difference now is YouTube will make some money off your views which seems reasonable since they are hosting it for free, and realistically it'll be pennies at best if you have a small channel with 15 views per video.
Original comment:
The wording of this isn't 100% crystal clear but I have a feeling this article might be making this out to be way worse than it is.
I have 10k subs on YouTube and made a decision not to run ads on my channel from the beginning because I care more about the viewing experience than profiting.
Technically I'm in the YouTube Partner Program and I choose not to turn on monetization for my videos. Monetization is basically a checkbox you can turn on and off for each video and then if you enable it, you choose some information about how the ads are shown.
Going by the TOS update's wording, it sounds like if you're in the YPP then your videos will have not have these new ads placed in them if you choose to disable monetization for a video.
It sounds like it's only going to affect channels who have a handful of subs and views, in which case you were making $0 guaranteed anyways because you couldn't turn monetization on due to not being in the YPP. The only difference now is YouTube will make some money off your views which seems reasonable since they are hosting it for free, and realistically it'll be pennies at best if you have a small channel with 15 views per video.
Good points! My analysis:
1. "Youtube partner program" can be terminated after 6 months of zero interaction with users, though creator shall reapply.
2. Youtube shall run ads on non YPP videos.
So idea seems to be, takeaway 'ideal creators' money from them to 'Youtube'.
Is it fair to disassociate creator from "YPP/ads share" for 6 month/more dis-engagement?
1. "Youtube partner program" can be terminated after 6 months of zero interaction with users, though creator shall reapply.
2. Youtube shall run ads on non YPP videos.
So idea seems to be, takeaway 'ideal creators' money from them to 'Youtube'.
Is it fair to disassociate creator from "YPP/ads share" for 6 month/more dis-engagement?
"It's not as bad as it seems because it doesn't affect me personally". Thanks for your input mate.
> "It's not as bad as it seems because it doesn't affect me personally". Thanks for your input mate.
I didn't say that, so you might want to remove your quotes.
The article made it seem like people with 5 million daily views who decided not to monetize their videos would get ads placed into their videos and make $0 with no way to opt-out while YouTube profited from ads in those views. That would be way different (and worse) than what's really happening.
I didn't say that, so you might want to remove your quotes.
The article made it seem like people with 5 million daily views who decided not to monetize their videos would get ads placed into their videos and make $0 with no way to opt-out while YouTube profited from ads in those views. That would be way different (and worse) than what's really happening.
I have YouTube Premium, so this doesn't affect me as a YouTube viewer. However, this is the sort of foundational service change that you simply don't do ten years into a lucrative partner program without a good reason. "It's 2020 and our investors are hungry for growth" is not a good enough reason, IMO. Any good business needs to keep it's goals aligned with it's customers or it will stop being a good business and people will want to leave. "Changing the deal" in a very big way like this makes your customers - the people giving you video content with no up-front expectation of payment - very, very mad.
I have a feeling you're going to start to see certain creators deliberately put advertiser unfriendly content in their videos just to get out of monetization now. Certain videos are already deliberately not monetized because they either are viewer-funded channels (which YouTube very much missed the boat on) or are promotional videos. YouTube should grandfather those channels and videos in as monetization-exempt, because that was "the deal" that people signed on to. Hell, if that's already financially untenable, you should at least still allow YouTube Partners - i.e. the people whose financial incentives are most aligned with monetization anyway - deliberately demonetize their own videos. Because, again, they are your customers and that was the deal they signed on to.
I have a feeling you're going to start to see certain creators deliberately put advertiser unfriendly content in their videos just to get out of monetization now. Certain videos are already deliberately not monetized because they either are viewer-funded channels (which YouTube very much missed the boat on) or are promotional videos. YouTube should grandfather those channels and videos in as monetization-exempt, because that was "the deal" that people signed on to. Hell, if that's already financially untenable, you should at least still allow YouTube Partners - i.e. the people whose financial incentives are most aligned with monetization anyway - deliberately demonetize their own videos. Because, again, they are your customers and that was the deal they signed on to.
> However, this is the sort of foundational service change that you simply don't do ten years into a lucrative partner program without a good reason.
YouTube is a monopoly. This is exactly the type of things monopolies do.
Yes, there are other places to upload videos to watch on demand, but they’re much smaller, less well known, and just more niche.
> "Changing the deal" in a very big way like this makes your customers - the people giving you video content with no up-front expectation of payment - very, very mad.
As the saying goes, “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”
The creator is not a customer. The viewer is not a customer. The advertiser is the customer.
Yes, you can poison the well and lose users, and thus alienate your customers, but again, YouTube is a monopoly. There aren’t any obviously viable alternatives for long form videos.
YouTube is a monopoly. This is exactly the type of things monopolies do.
Yes, there are other places to upload videos to watch on demand, but they’re much smaller, less well known, and just more niche.
> "Changing the deal" in a very big way like this makes your customers - the people giving you video content with no up-front expectation of payment - very, very mad.
As the saying goes, “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”
The creator is not a customer. The viewer is not a customer. The advertiser is the customer.
Yes, you can poison the well and lose users, and thus alienate your customers, but again, YouTube is a monopoly. There aren’t any obviously viable alternatives for long form videos.
> There aren’t any obviously viable alternatives for long form videos.
There are plenty of alternatives in some sense; stuff like Bitchute exists and allows you to post whatever you want and it works well enough, but the reason I don't go on there is that it seems like a lot of the content is basically just neo-Nazi crap, which of course I don't really want to watch.
And I suppose that's kind of the issues; YouTube has become so normalized that it's sort of impossible for alternative video sites to reach a similar scale, and the ones that do pop up inherently start appealing mostly to the fringe groups that aren't safe for YouTube.
There are plenty of alternatives in some sense; stuff like Bitchute exists and allows you to post whatever you want and it works well enough, but the reason I don't go on there is that it seems like a lot of the content is basically just neo-Nazi crap, which of course I don't really want to watch.
And I suppose that's kind of the issues; YouTube has become so normalized that it's sort of impossible for alternative video sites to reach a similar scale, and the ones that do pop up inherently start appealing mostly to the fringe groups that aren't safe for YouTube.
I think you’re analysis is basically correct. The only creators attracted to YouTube alternatives are those that have been forced off YouTube. You see the same thing with 8chan, Gab, and now Parler.
Now niche doesn’t necessarily mean “cesspool of hate”, but that is a niche. For a while Vimeo seemed to be the place where I found embeds of art videos, so I attributed that niche to it, but I can’t remember the last time I saw a Vimeo embed. YouTube has sucked all the air out of the room. To underline this point, I hadn’t even heard of Bitchute until now.
Now niche doesn’t necessarily mean “cesspool of hate”, but that is a niche. For a while Vimeo seemed to be the place where I found embeds of art videos, so I attributed that niche to it, but I can’t remember the last time I saw a Vimeo embed. YouTube has sucked all the air out of the room. To underline this point, I hadn’t even heard of Bitchute until now.
Vimeo has sold itself as a video host, rather than a platform for attracting viewers. There are plenty of vimeo videos that are private and password protected.
> Hell, if that's already financially untenable, you should at least still allow YouTube Partners - i.e. the people whose financial incentives are most aligned with monetization anyway - deliberately demonetize their own videos. Because, again, they are your customers and that was the deal they signed on to.
My understanding is this is exactly what they're doing. Another poster in these comments reached out to YouTube support who confirmed ads will not be placed on partnered videos who have declined to show ads. The policy is effective for non-partnered videos.
Admittedly this is second hand information.
My understanding is this is exactly what they're doing. Another poster in these comments reached out to YouTube support who confirmed ads will not be placed on partnered videos who have declined to show ads. The policy is effective for non-partnered videos.
Admittedly this is second hand information.
Most of the creators I watch are switching to a combination of Patreon and in-video advertising "reads" (have you heard about Kiwi Co?!?) both of which cut Google out of the equation so it's not too surprising to me Google is cranking up the dial on their own advertisements.
Only they are doing it on channels with out enough viewers to choose those options. Shady af.
Why is it shady, should Youtube host your video for free? Youtube is an insane free service, there's nothing that comes close to the video and stream quality.
To be honest I'm surprised so many video's have been hosted without ads while the creators cash in outside of Google.
To be honest I'm surprised so many video's have been hosted without ads while the creators cash in outside of Google.
They should give creators an option to pay for hosting or to do revenue share with different ad providers. What a Google does is anti competitive and should be illegal.
> Why is it shady, should Youtube host your video for free?
That has been the service since release, so yes.
That has been the service since release, so yes.
It’s still free ...
>should Youtube host your video for free?
Yes, because I am making content for them for free. It is unpaid labor on my part in exchange for free hosting. Now it is unpaid labor that makes them money.
Yes, because I am making content for them for free. It is unpaid labor on my part in exchange for free hosting. Now it is unpaid labor that makes them money.
Could someone explain the downvotes? I do not believe this is such a radical opinion. Prior to this change you were still producing content for the YouTube ecosystem for free until you hit 4k view hours. Then you could begin to make a meager amount of money. It is not such a great deal for content creators and now it is even worse.
“I am making content for them for free.”
YouTube is a business.
Hosting and serving your content costs them money.
If your content provides no means to recoup those costs, you’re not doing them a favor, they’re doing you a favor.
YouTube is a business.
Hosting and serving your content costs them money.
If your content provides no means to recoup those costs, you’re not doing them a favor, they’re doing you a favor.
You are not making content for youtube _for free_ - because they didn't ask you to do it. You are just making content.
But you did ask youtube to host for free.
But you did ask youtube to host for free.
I wonder how long YT will tolerate those in-video ads when YT Premium is supposed to allow for an ad-free experience.
I'm also curious as to how the advertisers and YT channels come up with pricing. The advertisers will have no metrics on how often the ad was skipped over, and maybe it's a coincidence, but the channels seem to keep the in-video ad lengths to integer multiples of 'skip 10 seconds' button presses.
I'm also curious as to how the advertisers and YT channels come up with pricing. The advertisers will have no metrics on how often the ad was skipped over, and maybe it's a coincidence, but the channels seem to keep the in-video ad lengths to integer multiples of 'skip 10 seconds' button presses.
I’m curious why it’s not a feature of YT Premium to just auto-skip over the parts videos marked as being sponsored content (which the video creator has always needed to annotate the video with for legal reasons — it’s currently shown as a yellow-shaded area on the video timeline bar.)
Heck, I’m surprised and confused that YT hasn’t just required these embedded ads to be separated out into their own video streams, which YT then would embed back into the video seamlessly in the regular case, but would be able to drop out in the YT Premium case. (And could also swap out for other ads at a certain frequency — 30%, say?)
Heck, I’m surprised and confused that YT hasn’t just required these embedded ads to be separated out into their own video streams, which YT then would embed back into the video seamlessly in the regular case, but would be able to drop out in the YT Premium case. (And could also swap out for other ads at a certain frequency — 30%, say?)
Maybe that’s a region dependent feature, but my YT only marks YT-supplied ads in yellow on the timeline. Videos with a sponsored segment (as in, “this video was sponsored by ... checkout this amazing product of theirs”) only show a small banner at the start “contains sponsored content” or something similar.
I found this one on HN (I think yesterday?) https://sponsor.ajay.app/
Perhaps by YT being involved in the ad insertion they'd demand a cut of revenue?
I mean, that’s a reason content-creators wouldn’t want it, not a reason YT wouldn’t want it.
"The advertisers will have no metrics on how often the ad was skipped over"
Lots of the advertisements ask you to visit a custom URL or use a discount code which the advertisers can use as lower bound on how effective an advertisement is.
Lots of the advertisements ask you to visit a custom URL or use a discount code which the advertisers can use as lower bound on how effective an advertisement is.
You can argue the custom code is enough, but you're still missing out on a lot of metrics, most importantly when the decision was made (in which part of which video).
For sure. Certainly not ideal but better than naught.
In my mind, there are two large categories of advertisements. The first and more common on traditional media is exposure-type ads which are just about getting the brand name embedded in your head so choose that product over another next time you're shopping.
The second is the type in these sponsor ads. They have calls to action and are still interested to a small degree in brand awareness, but it's not the main focus.
All that's to say, the latter type of ads is about how many people follow the link and less so about whether the ad landed on all the eyeballs.
At least that's my layperson's view, devoid of having ever studied advertising.
The second is the type in these sponsor ads. They have calls to action and are still interested to a small degree in brand awareness, but it's not the main focus.
All that's to say, the latter type of ads is about how many people follow the link and less so about whether the ad landed on all the eyeballs.
At least that's my layperson's view, devoid of having ever studied advertising.
But thats channels decision, you can always 'skip ad' with 'forward 10 sec'. Else, You shall avoid the channel altogether.
Hacker News User Will Continue to Run uBlock Origin on All Sites Including YouTube Even If Webmasters Don't Want Him To
I think technically it would be pretty easy for google to embed ads into videos in a way that would be hard to impossible to block.
I've long wondered why they don't do this for video ads. If they were served as part of the main video stream it would be almost impossible for ad-blockers to filter them.
(I even think the DASH segmentation would allow them to this without reencoding the original video, but that's just speculation on my part)
(I even think the DASH segmentation would allow them to this without reencoding the original video, but that's just speculation on my part)
I think maybe the problem is that you do need to have a seperate mode for ads, so you can click on them. and as long as that's the case, there are going to be ways to block them
- Embed ads into the video itself, as suggested above
- Stream ad start/end events to the browser, with no duration info
- On sending the start event, lock the user's session such that they can't change their position within the video. lock it server-side, and client-side. Start event will include details of the ad being displayed for any interactivity.
- Unlock the session after the duration of the ad has elapsed, which is only known server-side. Then send the end event to the browser so it can be unlocked client-side.
- Stream ad start/end events to the browser, with no duration info
- On sending the start event, lock the user's session such that they can't change their position within the video. lock it server-side, and client-side. Start event will include details of the ad being displayed for any interactivity.
- Unlock the session after the duration of the ad has elapsed, which is only known server-side. Then send the end event to the browser so it can be unlocked client-side.
you could still block that ad, you would just be delaying people. the browser plugin could fake stream the ad before you click play. it still means you have to wait sometimes, but you won't have to actually watch the ad. The big problem with this is that now you're heavily incentivizing people to spoof ad watching to get around it, and then you start having trouble measuring the real numbers, which advertisers won't be happy about
What a great mode that would be. I would probably skip a lot of movies during this period like “do I really want to watch this?”
Twitch does it. I can't block their ads even with any ad blocker or no script.
Twitch does this already: https://twitchadvertising.tv/ad-products/surestream/
Twitch ads, including surestream ones, are blockable/bypassable.
How does one do this? I've tried but eventually just gave up and currently I'm not in a situation where a PiHole would be viable.
Many VCRs had a feature to skip ads when recording, working solely on the (analog) video stream. They worked quite well using only the technology of the time.
For UK, it looks for a special mark being used by ITV companies (and Channel 4, which are ultimately controlled by IBA) which is mainly used to signal companies in other regions that they should switch to an advertisement tailored for their region [1]. Since the television channels were controlled by IBA and BBC, this is a for-sure way to skip advertisements.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_mark#Cue_dots_in_televisio...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_mark#Cue_dots_in_televisio...
I think those VCRs looked for the short black screen between the programming and commercials
I thought it was triggered by audio volume, because ads are typically louder and more consistently loud. Maybe it was a combination. Not so sure how well it ever worked, though.
I remember from my childhood seeing an icon in the screen corner indicating adverts were about to start. This was on terrestrial British TV.
Frasier had long enough black transitions between scenes to trigger the fast forward on mine
Twitch has launched its crusade against ads. Going so far to look into all the adblock exploits being posted and patching them by day basis. Twitch is winning as of now. YouTube will do the same.
It would be hard to work around this https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock
You can already effectively block all sponsored segment through SponsorBlock. I imagine that if Youtube were to randomly "inline" ads in the stream they're delivering to you, crowd-sourcing would also be an effective way to combat it. Make a "signature" of sorts of the video by pulling data from users and detect the ad bit on on your side using it. Well, that is if the ads come from the same domain as the legit video bits.
Google values its monopoly status pretty highly. I don't think you're playing out this scenario far enough in your head.
Very probably not. Dynamic ad insertion usually uses separate domains for serving the ad media and it's probably not viable to inject totally unblockable dynamic ads at the media level. And also not breaking YT for some clients on the way.
twitch.tv has started doing this very thing, so it's definitely possible. Twitch and youtube respond to each other's actions so youtube could easily end up doing this too.
It would probably be a good thing for me, since forcing annoying ads will make me stop using YouTube. I insta-close any website which forces me to turn off my ad blocker.
I think in many countries content that is an ad must be clearly marked by law. Should be easy to skip.
It would be very expensive, though, as they would have to recode videos constantly.
(Edit: my children comments are right)
(Edit: my children comments are right)
At first I thought you had a point (and for practical purposes, perhaps you do) but I don't think it'd be particularly challenging to inject video frames into a stream without re-encoding the original video.
It’s not challenging.[a] ffmpeg can “join” streams back-to-back without reencoding if one desires.
[a]: This is assuming you know the magic incantation to get ffmpeg to do it
[a]: This is assuming you know the magic incantation to get ffmpeg to do it
You just need to make sure the video sections are stored in a concatenatable format (like mpeg or m4s), and then you can literally use cat.
if anyone has the resources to figure out this magic incantation, it would be Google.
It’s not that difficult a command compared to what is possible with ffmpeg. But it’s also a pretty common enough task that literally the first result for using DDG with “ffmpeg concatenate without reencoding” gave: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49371422/how-to-merge-tw...
You can cut on any key frame and switch to another video.
Twitch has figured it out
They would be heavily pressed for storage then.
Twitch literally started doing this a few weeks ago (unblockable ads embedded in the stream), but the geniuses of HN that downvoted you know better.
however Youtube app users are in a lurch as watching videos that way can result with ads even part way through a video and it seems wholly random how much you can watch before an ad pop.
Also, Twitch has been waging a war of sorts against uBlock and others with their forced ads on streams you are not subscribed to. For the most part both youtube and twitch are doing their damn best force ads into all content though for the time being twitch does let subscribers to a channel avoid an ad on that channel
Also, Twitch has been waging a war of sorts against uBlock and others with their forced ads on streams you are not subscribed to. For the most part both youtube and twitch are doing their damn best force ads into all content though for the time being twitch does let subscribers to a channel avoid an ad on that channel
DRM on YouTube would block that.
As well as Webbundles.
Thereby Making it Worse for Everyone Else.
Indiscriminate measures don't provide helpful information. Support videos that have acceptable ads. Don't support ones that don't. Downvote them, comment, and, most importantly, be willing not to watch them, ever. YouTube can learn, much like a dog, as long as the feedback is clear and swift
Indiscriminate measures don't provide helpful information. Support videos that have acceptable ads. Don't support ones that don't. Downvote them, comment, and, most importantly, be willing not to watch them, ever. YouTube can learn, much like a dog, as long as the feedback is clear and swift
We already support videos that have acceptable ads: not YouTube ads, but in-video ads. The creator is paid directly by the advertiser with no middle-man, the user is not tracked and can easily skip them, and personally I prefer these ads instead of unskippable TV-like commercials .
Same here. I usually just shoplift at the retail store and then send the wholesale price to the wholesaler. Not a big fan of middlemen.
It's a pretty good back around not having a Costco account.
It's a pretty good back around not having a Costco account.
And you expect YouTube to host these for free so the creator can be paid why exactly?
Does YouTube get a cut?
YouTube doesn't have any acceptable ads.
Nonsense. They have a lot of short and inoffensive ads, and similar delivery methods. They also have a lot of long offensive ones, and we should give them an incentive to favor the former
Short...I remember getting several 15 to 30 minute ads on 5 minute videos. At lest they were skipable.
To be fair, the ads themselves were interesting, I just didn't have time to watch all of them.
To be fair, the ads themselves were interesting, I just didn't have time to watch all of them.
Oh, they try to get away with some shit. Just gotta be ready for it. They get me occasionally when I'm elbow deep in dishwater. I'm pretty sure they model people who are asleep or afk and hit them with the worst ads
Bait and switch. This is what big companies do. They buy products that are a threat to them, or allow them to address the threat of another company. Then they offer the bought company's services for free for a period. Then it ends.
The point is to kill competition so they can settle in and collect rent.
The point is to kill competition so they can settle in and collect rent.
> Then they offer the bought company's services for free for a period. Then it ends.
It ends because there is an expectation of continuous growth. Eventually the predatory company starts corrupting the free model to increase revenue incrementally (all the while, internal development costs start to rise with bureaucracy) until the revenue growth is outstripped by development cost or market demand falls to equal/below a measurable amount.
Usually before, but at various times, some smaller startup with funding to stay alive or a novel business model grows with more agile process and lower cost expectations while the old predator tries to flail about (reducing ads or subscription costs) shedding users who invested, all the way down while maintaining all the bloat.
This is what happened to Yahoo, I think.
It ends because there is an expectation of continuous growth. Eventually the predatory company starts corrupting the free model to increase revenue incrementally (all the while, internal development costs start to rise with bureaucracy) until the revenue growth is outstripped by development cost or market demand falls to equal/below a measurable amount.
Usually before, but at various times, some smaller startup with funding to stay alive or a novel business model grows with more agile process and lower cost expectations while the old predator tries to flail about (reducing ads or subscription costs) shedding users who invested, all the way down while maintaining all the bloat.
This is what happened to Yahoo, I think.
true that. Amazon is a perfect example
Having youtube premium is definitely the biggest time saver for me.
Other than not showing ads, lets you listen to videos like a podcast on mobile in background. For podcasts that also posts youtube videos, I just use youtube since it lets me see reactions when I want to from podcasters.
I never understand HN Crowd complaining about ads on YouTube. It literally costs(1 month sub) less than typing a comment like this for most people on HN (At least in opportunity cost).
I never understand HN Crowd complaining about ads on YouTube. It literally costs(1 month sub) less than typing a comment like this for most people on HN (At least in opportunity cost).
YouTube premium is great, I'm surprised it's not more popular. I'd cut my Spotify subscription way before YouTube, but that's not what I typically hear from my friends.
Spotify = Streaming music $12/month YouTube = Streaming music + learned SolidWorks + learned Blender + learning Spanish + general entertainment of all sorts... $12/month. YouTube is incredible.
Spotify = Streaming music $12/month YouTube = Streaming music + learned SolidWorks + learned Blender + learning Spanish + general entertainment of all sorts... $12/month. YouTube is incredible.
It’s not popular because it’s incredibly expensive. For $12/month you get:
- No ads
- Minor usability improvements to the app
- “premium” content
- YouTube Music
The “premium” content is trash and YouTube Music is the worst music app with any significant effort put behind it, in addition to being a significant step down from Google‘s previous offering.
Most people would rather deal with the ads.
- No ads
- Minor usability improvements to the app
- “premium” content
- YouTube Music
The “premium” content is trash and YouTube Music is the worst music app with any significant effort put behind it, in addition to being a significant step down from Google‘s previous offering.
Most people would rather deal with the ads.
If youtube premium allowed you to access _all_ member's only videos on all channels, then it's be worth it.
It's not popular here because "YouTube Premium is not available in your country"
Also, I'd rather not feed the monopoly even more.
YouTube Music is a joke.
Really? I get my best music recommendations from normal YouTube. I figured their music service would be solid. Apple Music which I primarily use can’t find me new artists that I like, and when I had Spotify it was awful.
Really? I get the total opossite. Spotify keeps letting me find amazing bands with just 2 years if learning my taste. Youtube keeps telling me I want to watch the same music videos over and over.
YouTube premium is great - I wish I could pay for ad free Twitter.
Being able to pay for a service without ads is worth it.
Users complaining about a free ad subsidized service come across as unreasonable to me (and maybe a little entitled).
Being able to pay for a service without ads is worth it.
Users complaining about a free ad subsidized service come across as unreasonable to me (and maybe a little entitled).
The most annoying part to me about ads on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram is just how hard it's pushed. You get 1 piece of content in your feed before an ad. The ads always use rich media so they'll take up 2x the space of a typical tweet for example so you get 1 person's post, followed by 2/3rds of your screen taken for an ad. Let me see like 3-5 posts from accounts I care about you fucking vultures.
I am happy with ads, but you probably have never been hit by a 30 min sponsored video at the beginning of a youtube video.
The ads turn the whole watching experience into a remote-searching minigame. I'd much rather have unskippable, but reasonably long ads.
The ads turn the whole watching experience into a remote-searching minigame. I'd much rather have unskippable, but reasonably long ads.
How does this comment make sense as a reply? Obviously he has never been hit by one of those because he pays for Youtube and gets the ad free version. Same as me.
The real problem with that model, I think, is that the people who can afford to pay to opt out are the same people that are most valuable as ad recipients.
It's not really a problem when the model is to focus on making a great experience for paying users and just dumping ads on free users.
The revenue generation focus and incentive alignment is with paying users not advertisers. If the ads don't make as much money or have a more limited audience that's fine.
Obviously the entirety of Google is structured so this isn't the case, but in products I like better than Google products (Substack, Spotify, Apple) the focus is on paying customers. Ads, if they exist at all, are only on freemium versions of the product.
The revenue generation focus and incentive alignment is with paying users not advertisers. If the ads don't make as much money or have a more limited audience that's fine.
Obviously the entirety of Google is structured so this isn't the case, but in products I like better than Google products (Substack, Spotify, Apple) the focus is on paying customers. Ads, if they exist at all, are only on freemium versions of the product.
Twitter doesn't include ads in their API, so all 3rd-party clients are ad-free (unless they include their own ads)
Nitter is great for avoiding ads.
For me, the biggest plus of YouTube Premium is supporting the creators. Almost every initiative to pay a large number of blogs and creators at once has failed because it's too difficult to get them all to sign on and distribute money to all of them. YouTube is a monopoly for better and worse, so it was easier for them to implement ad-free for almost every video creator.
I wish Google Contributor could live up to the same promise, but Google killed it and replaced it with a different version. It made you a participant in the bidding process for your own ad views. So unless an advertiser was bidding a crazy amount of money, you would win the bid and an empty ad (or no ad at all) would load instead. Like YouTube Premium, this took advantage of the existing ad payment infrastructure while removing almost all the ads from your pages and videos.
I wish Google Contributor could live up to the same promise, but Google killed it and replaced it with a different version. It made you a participant in the bidding process for your own ad views. So unless an advertiser was bidding a crazy amount of money, you would win the bid and an empty ad (or no ad at all) would load instead. Like YouTube Premium, this took advantage of the existing ad payment infrastructure while removing almost all the ads from your pages and videos.
The content creator is much better off being paid directly via a donation, or for the viewer to purchase merch.
Youtube premium is utter trash due to the way the money is split.
Youtube premium is utter trash due to the way the money is split.
Opportunity costs can only be considered if you could (and would) monetize your extra time. It's not the case for most people.
plus, you still support the content creators whereas adblockers do not.
Google is already making money by raping privacy. Why should we keep advocating additional streams of revenue? I'd gladly pay for google's services as long as they pay me for the data they steal. My data is worth a lot more to me than some bandwidth costs.
I feel like YouTube as we knew it before is probably going to come to an end soon. Between youtube ads, ad reads, sponsors, patreon plugs and merch ads, it is either going to wind up looking like cable tv or it is going to die and make way for some paid service.
I saw a video with a sponsor, a separate THREE MINUTE ad read for some stupid mobile game AND 2 youtube ads. The video was 10 minutes.
I understand video creators need to make money but at this point i’d rather just have some patreon service where I can subscribe to channels individually for a dollar or two a month.
It seems like the fate of all streaming services is to end up like cable.
I saw a video with a sponsor, a separate THREE MINUTE ad read for some stupid mobile game AND 2 youtube ads. The video was 10 minutes.
I understand video creators need to make money but at this point i’d rather just have some patreon service where I can subscribe to channels individually for a dollar or two a month.
It seems like the fate of all streaming services is to end up like cable.
I feel like YouTube as we knew it before is probably going to come to an end soon. Between youtube ads, ad reads, sponsors, patreon plugs and merch ads, it is either going to wind up looking like cable tv or it is going to die and make way for some paid service.
And would that really be a bad thing?
Social media sites and content hosting services like YouTube have become like the old book publishers and record labels. They provide a largely fungible middleman service to the creators who generate the real value by creating new material, yet somehow for a long time they've wound up keeping the lion's share of the financial benefits.
It's natural that creators will push back, whether through things like sponsored placements or through other revenue schemes like Patreon. But even if it's just providing storage, distribution and possibly discoverability to the creators, the host service still has bills to pay and needs to make enough revenue somewhere to be a viable business.
The ideal outcome, IMHO, would be to separate the hosting/distribution from the discoverability, have hosting services that charge real money for providing a real service and effectively compete for the best content creators, and have the equivalent of search engines or recommendation systems to help people find the content, whoever is hosting it. The latter could still operate on some sort of ad-based scheme, without interfering with delivery of the main content itself. In short, I'd like to see a return to a more decentralised system, where the content creators are the driving force, and the intermediaries have to provide their fungible services in a competitive market without becoming the de facto controlling entities for the whole system. See also: self-published writing, music, etc.
And would that really be a bad thing?
Social media sites and content hosting services like YouTube have become like the old book publishers and record labels. They provide a largely fungible middleman service to the creators who generate the real value by creating new material, yet somehow for a long time they've wound up keeping the lion's share of the financial benefits.
It's natural that creators will push back, whether through things like sponsored placements or through other revenue schemes like Patreon. But even if it's just providing storage, distribution and possibly discoverability to the creators, the host service still has bills to pay and needs to make enough revenue somewhere to be a viable business.
The ideal outcome, IMHO, would be to separate the hosting/distribution from the discoverability, have hosting services that charge real money for providing a real service and effectively compete for the best content creators, and have the equivalent of search engines or recommendation systems to help people find the content, whoever is hosting it. The latter could still operate on some sort of ad-based scheme, without interfering with delivery of the main content itself. In short, I'd like to see a return to a more decentralised system, where the content creators are the driving force, and the intermediaries have to provide their fungible services in a competitive market without becoming the de facto controlling entities for the whole system. See also: self-published writing, music, etc.
I would be strongly surprised if ad-blockers keep working on Youtube indefinitely. And further, if youtube-dl continues to work.
It's time to coin a new term, "Ad Creep"
- One Ad per video that the creator chooses to elect
- Each Ad can be skipped after 5 seconds
- Two Ads now but the first can still be skipped the second cannot
- The first Ad's skip time increased from 5 seconds to 6 seconds
- Videos get Ads regardless of creator consent
I'm noticing a trend, and it sucks for those that like to use YouTube in app form since you're kind of stuck w/o the use of Ad Blockers.
- One Ad per video that the creator chooses to elect
- Each Ad can be skipped after 5 seconds
- Two Ads now but the first can still be skipped the second cannot
- The first Ad's skip time increased from 5 seconds to 6 seconds
- Videos get Ads regardless of creator consent
I'm noticing a trend, and it sucks for those that like to use YouTube in app form since you're kind of stuck w/o the use of Ad Blockers.
I think you're looking for Overton Window, actually [1]. Also, I'm waiting for the the last shoe to drop: showing ads even to users that have YouTube Red; it's only a matter of time.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
... And an aphorism: "Any social platform that becomes as popular as TV also becomes as trash as TV".
Remember when we used to think YouTube was going to replace TV? Well... I guess we were spot on.
- Videos get 15 second unskippable ads
- Videos get 30 second to 3 hour long ads
- Videos have several sets of two ads within the video.
- Videos get 30 second to 3 hour long ads
- Videos have several sets of two ads within the video.
This makes me reconsider Vimeo as a video platform. This year I decided to invest my free time in creating two channels for Painting(art in general) and Drawing (design focused), all is planned and tested and the only thing left on the table is video platform. YouTube as a platform rewards "dopamine reaction", controversy topics, kick-bait thumbnails, short form format and so on. Yes, there is a ton of good stuff that is actually hard to find because the Algorithm is fine-tuned to work in absurd way by pushing non relevant content. As a creator after recent changes to UI/UX you cannot tailor user experience in full. Using playlists is not enough of a tool for me.
YouTube is useful for big brands with lots of content with high revenue and everyone small is pushing it hard to find a way to be liked and stay relevant to "monetization" practices. At this point if you as creator don't rely on ad-revenue YouTube is not your place.
YouTube is useful for big brands with lots of content with high revenue and everyone small is pushing it hard to find a way to be liked and stay relevant to "monetization" practices. At this point if you as creator don't rely on ad-revenue YouTube is not your place.
/rant I really hate YouTube now. Everyone wants to put every bit of information in a 10+ min long video b/c 10 min videos get better ad rates. So they spend the first 4 min w/ a long ass 'intro' sequence on all videos, then pleading you subscribe and 'hit the bell' then plugging patreon, then some long backstory, then the gem of info you came for that could have been a tweet. Oh and all this is broken up by ads at the beginning and middle of the videos, it's a cesspool I refuse to pay for. /rant
It's like searching blog posts for recipes all over again.
Funny that everyone here is talking about small creators when an even larger impact will be on large companies using YouTube for content and for product instructionals. If I'm a brand, and I'm reaching you organically through branded content. I do not want another ad play before my content.
Then those companies should use a paid video CDN service to host their content?
Which now makes me wonder if YouTube will launch a paid hosting offering sometime in the future that guarantees ad-free viewing.
Which now makes me wonder if YouTube will launch a paid hosting offering sometime in the future that guarantees ad-free viewing.
Or they could use Vimeo but the issue is people search for stuff on YouTube.
For example, when I'm interested in a product (synths, videogames, etc) I go directly to YouTube to watch demos and reviews. If it's not there I won't see it.
For example, when I'm interested in a product (synths, videogames, etc) I go directly to YouTube to watch demos and reviews. If it's not there I won't see it.
[deleted]
I'm pissed, I knew this was coming. Google and "Alphabet" are bastards.
Will this be my last video hosted on YouTube?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUYrN0o-cfk | Hardneck Garlic Planted For High Yield.
YouTube doesn't give me any network effect anyways (all my views are from external sources), I was just trying to do good in the world.
What tech should I look at for self hosted streaming on Digital Ocean spaces and a CDN? Please give me hints as to what I should do from a self-hosted perspective. I'm going to "DevOps" a solution, using webservers just like I do for many of my web domains. Where do I start, I want to build it from scratch using open source.
ideas?
I already have the domain unturf.com
Will this be my last video hosted on YouTube?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUYrN0o-cfk | Hardneck Garlic Planted For High Yield.
YouTube doesn't give me any network effect anyways (all my views are from external sources), I was just trying to do good in the world.
What tech should I look at for self hosted streaming on Digital Ocean spaces and a CDN? Please give me hints as to what I should do from a self-hosted perspective. I'm going to "DevOps" a solution, using webservers just like I do for many of my web domains. Where do I start, I want to build it from scratch using open source.
ideas?
I already have the domain unturf.com
For the server itself, a lot of people use providers with cheap bandwidth like OVH and Hetzner. Digital ocean is great but it's still bill by your bandwidth usage, probably not ideal to host video contents that can rack up a lot of bandwidth usage.
As for the application itself, just use ffmpeg to convert hls/dash and just dump it behind nginx, no need for fancy stuff imo.
Cloudflare stream is also a relatively cheap alternative to host your video if you do a lot of video embedding on your site. I heard that some school networks block it, but other than that it's been working great and I've been using for one of my client to host their private lecture videos.
Vimeo is also a great alternative and relatively cheap too. My only gripes is it's blocked in certain countries, but otherwise it's fine if you don't care to serve visitors from those countries.
As for the application itself, just use ffmpeg to convert hls/dash and just dump it behind nginx, no need for fancy stuff imo.
Cloudflare stream is also a relatively cheap alternative to host your video if you do a lot of video embedding on your site. I heard that some school networks block it, but other than that it's been working great and I've been using for one of my client to host their private lecture videos.
Vimeo is also a great alternative and relatively cheap too. My only gripes is it's blocked in certain countries, but otherwise it's fine if you don't care to serve visitors from those countries.
Check out PeerTube. It may be exactly what you're looking for.
Naw, PeerTube is clunky and I don't think I need the network effect. I want to host videos (for download or streaming) like I host static web pages.
You could do something like what N-O-D-E.net does. Although I couldn't find a video on their setup, I've heard the administrator is active on their IRC channel, or you could email them at mail at n-o-d-e.net if you wanted to ask.
https://n-o-d-e.net/
https://n-o-d-e.net/node_mini_server3.html
https://n-o-d-e.net/
https://n-o-d-e.net/node_mini_server3.html
Thanks mate, I'll check this out, I also use IRC so that's always the most fun way to reach out.
Hmm. AlternativeTo has a list[0]. Not a great list, but a list.
Looking at that, possibly MediaGoblin could work.
Alternately, something like Jellyfin may work, but that's a little bit of a push.
[0] https://alternativeto.net/software/youtube/?platform=self-ho...
Looking at that, possibly MediaGoblin could work.
Alternately, something like Jellyfin may work, but that's a little bit of a push.
[0] https://alternativeto.net/software/youtube/?platform=self-ho...
How about vimeo?
> I'm pissed, I knew this was coming. Google and "Alphabet" are bastards.
Yeah, how dare they charge for storage, CPU encoding and bandwidth costs!
Anyway, you can deploy nginx with RTMP module on any server and host videos yourself. We did this for many video providers (which then moved on to YT because it turns out hosting costs money), but it's not that hard.
Yeah, how dare they charge for storage, CPU encoding and bandwidth costs!
Anyway, you can deploy nginx with RTMP module on any server and host videos yourself. We did this for many video providers (which then moved on to YT because it turns out hosting costs money), but it's not that hard.
They are not charging me for storage, they are putting ads on my videos with no way to opt-out. Ads of the like that I have _NO_ desire to be affiliated with, ads for pollutants like "weed killers" and "insecticides".
I don't care if they use fancy algorithms for transcoding (CPU cycles) or bandwidth costs, or storage, that was the deal. I ship to them and they host it without ads. I did this for the "promise" of networking effect but this is a lie, the algorithm hates me.
I will foot the bill for my own hosting, f them.
Does this seem like a decent guide?
https://www.nginx.com/blog/video-streaming-for-remote-learni...
I don't care if they use fancy algorithms for transcoding (CPU cycles) or bandwidth costs, or storage, that was the deal. I ship to them and they host it without ads. I did this for the "promise" of networking effect but this is a lie, the algorithm hates me.
I will foot the bill for my own hosting, f them.
Does this seem like a decent guide?
https://www.nginx.com/blog/video-streaming-for-remote-learni...
You can use ffmpeg to convert your video to HLS/Dash format and host it behind your run-of-the-mill nginx webserver as static contents. Then on your webpages, just use hls.js [0] to embed those uploaded videos in a webpages. hls.js will handle adaptive bitrate automatically, so the videos should load pretty fast for your visitor, though probably not as fast as youtube since they have edge servers everywhere, but still a lot faster than just hosting an .mp4 file and load it via <video> tag.
You don't need fancy plugins or webservers just to serve adaptive bitrate anymore these days as HLS/Dash provides many benefits of RTMP without the complexity cost. You only need to worry about bandwidth / cdn cost, and the cheapest bandwidth can be bought via hosting providers like hetzner and ovh.
[0] https://github.com/video-dev/hls.js/
You don't need fancy plugins or webservers just to serve adaptive bitrate anymore these days as HLS/Dash provides many benefits of RTMP without the complexity cost. You only need to worry about bandwidth / cdn cost, and the cheapest bandwidth can be bought via hosting providers like hetzner and ovh.
[0] https://github.com/video-dev/hls.js/
Thanks, I think I'll do a combination of this with a fallback to downloadable MP4 and inline video tags for clients without Javascript.
You say to convert to HLS/Dash, does hls.js support both? Pros cons of one other the other? Make sense to do both?
You say to convert to HLS/Dash, does hls.js support both? Pros cons of one other the other? Make sense to do both?
HLS seem to be the more popular format these days and browsers seem to start supporting it natively. I said hls/dash because both formats offers mostly the same benefit compared to just simply embedding mp4 files directly. You can use hls.js for hls and dash.js for dash, or video.js for both.
Thank you very much!
Tried it a few years back and last week, both times my video loads and then stops buffering after like 10 seconds. I'm likely doing something wrong but, do I need a dedicated server to seed my content?
Otherwise it seems busted.
Otherwise it seems busted.
Having just recently bought a Smart TV, I was shocked by the amount of ads that played. I pretty much stopped using it at this point.
There is just too many ads. I dont even know how they can cram more ads into videos at this point.
I had the same experience using the native Youtube app on iOS.
In my browsers (including on mobile), I always have adblock enabled but playing the video in the native Youtube app crams so many ads into a video it's ridiculous. They deliver ads on videos as short as 2 minutes long. Move onto the next video after watching an ad + 2 minute video == another ad.
I've stopped using the native app and have now switched to the mobile-browser version now (I use Adguard as an ad-blocker for mobile Safari which blocks YT ads in browser)..
In my browsers (including on mobile), I always have adblock enabled but playing the video in the native Youtube app crams so many ads into a video it's ridiculous. They deliver ads on videos as short as 2 minutes long. Move onto the next video after watching an ad + 2 minute video == another ad.
I've stopped using the native app and have now switched to the mobile-browser version now (I use Adguard as an ad-blocker for mobile Safari which blocks YT ads in browser)..
In the last year (or so?) the amount of ads I see when using the iOS/tvOS YouTube native apps has steadily increased, where now I basically have to sit through 2 x 15s ads at the start of almost any video I want to watch.
And only after the second or third video I watch am I finally given the "skip" button, and then after a few more videos, it's back to unskippable for a while, etc..
Not to mention the constant push for YT Premium, it's every 3rd or 4th time I launch the app now that I have to tap past a full-screen interstitial asking me to subscribe.
Google is already steadily increasing the amount of ads they are making people sit through on YouTube, and so a move like this just feels like more steps down the same path they've already been on for quite a while.
And only after the second or third video I watch am I finally given the "skip" button, and then after a few more videos, it's back to unskippable for a while, etc..
Not to mention the constant push for YT Premium, it's every 3rd or 4th time I launch the app now that I have to tap past a full-screen interstitial asking me to subscribe.
Google is already steadily increasing the amount of ads they are making people sit through on YouTube, and so a move like this just feels like more steps down the same path they've already been on for quite a while.
Even if you don't pay for Premium, just using a VPN in a smaller country helps a lot. Make sure you have all the personalized ads turned off in privacy settings.
There are at least ways to get the ads down to a manageable level in the mobile app.
If i notice a 15 sec ad before the video starts I just restart it and hope for a shorter one.
If there is two ads at the start of the video, you can close the video and relaunch it after the first ad is finished to skip the second one.
If the video has midroll ads you can scroll the video to the end and press restart from the beginning. That will remove the midroll ads.
If i notice a 15 sec ad before the video starts I just restart it and hope for a shorter one.
If there is two ads at the start of the video, you can close the video and relaunch it after the first ad is finished to skip the second one.
If the video has midroll ads you can scroll the video to the end and press restart from the beginning. That will remove the midroll ads.
Plus there are ads in the UI that look a lot like recommended / related videos.
YouTube has a demonetization feature too. Let's say you run a programming tutorials channel that's too small to monetize and you don't want Google layering ads over your content. Just crosspost something like a Tim Pool video and hope the YouTube AI categorizes your channel as too toxic for advertisers. Otherwise it'll be interesting to see how the standard changes when Google is the sole beneficiary. That money is too toxic for thee, not for me.
They’re running ads now on channels that were previously deemed too toxic for advertisers, which makes me doubt that that was ever a real concern and not just an excuse to defund people who made videos they didn’t like.
I'd rather have ads on my videos than ruin my reputation by posting trash like Tim Pool.
Darn, I use YouTube as a quick communication channel to users of an app I maintain. I’ll throw up a video to show a new feature or that something has changed. Sometimes I answer single tech support questions with a short video. That’ll be lame if ads start showing up.
I guess I’m free to host my own videos...
I guess I’m free to host my own videos...
I'll bet they add a way to pay to remove ads from a video soon. You know, for enterprise customers.
Why not pay for Youtube Premium? We're often talking about how we would gladly pay to keep a sustainable product going on but people are outraged that a _free_ service is increasing monetization through ads.
I think Youtube is great, it's where I find a lot of content, I use it a lot and not seeing ads makes a huge difference. Plus, Youtube Music is great value for the price.
I think Youtube is great, it's where I find a lot of content, I use it a lot and not seeing ads makes a huge difference. Plus, Youtube Music is great value for the price.
I used to pay for YouTube premium. But I left and switched to adblocking after it kept getting worse (YouTube is one of the few sites that I use an adblocker on).
- YouTube Music is awful, not a halfway decent product to replace the good Play Music.
- Stopped sending emails for video uploads (I know, I'm weird)
- "Premier" videos started to be shown in the RSS feeds. So now I am notified of stuff I can't even watch yet.
- Half the time videos just play at 360p even though I have never had a second of buffering on my 500Mpbs connection.
I think there were a couple of other things that were bugging me. But when they dropped the email notifications and the RSS feeds were terrible it was the last straw for me.
I would gladly pay if I felt that they were providing a good service and it was getting better.
- YouTube Music is awful, not a halfway decent product to replace the good Play Music.
- Stopped sending emails for video uploads (I know, I'm weird)
- "Premier" videos started to be shown in the RSS feeds. So now I am notified of stuff I can't even watch yet.
- Half the time videos just play at 360p even though I have never had a second of buffering on my 500Mpbs connection.
I think there were a couple of other things that were bugging me. But when they dropped the email notifications and the RSS feeds were terrible it was the last straw for me.
I would gladly pay if I felt that they were providing a good service and it was getting better.
> Half the time videos just play at 360p even though I have never had a second of buffering on my 500Mpbs connection.
Weird. I have a 50Mbps connection and get 1080p minimum on everything I watch. I like to use YT Music for discovery but not a full listening experience. Over all, YTP has really improved content discovery for me. Ad free makes it easy to find out which videos are BS.
Weird. I have a 50Mbps connection and get 1080p minimum on everything I watch. I like to use YT Music for discovery but not a full listening experience. Over all, YTP has really improved content discovery for me. Ad free makes it easy to find out which videos are BS.
> Half the time videos just play at 360p
This is your ISP's fault for having bad peering.
This is your ISP's fault for having bad peering.
I'm 99% sure it isn't my ISP. I get a very good connection to everything consistently including Google services. And switching to 4k works nearly instantly and never has hiccups.
For some reason their detection algorithm is bugged out.
For some reason their detection algorithm is bugged out.
I have a hard time justifying the price. It costs as much as Netflix, Crave, Hulu, etc.
These are platforms selling super polished content from professional production teams. Sure some of the content on YouTube meets that standard but most doesn’t.
I’m not interested in a bundled music service. I use Spotify and don’t wish to switch.
These are platforms selling super polished content from professional production teams. Sure some of the content on YouTube meets that standard but most doesn’t.
I’m not interested in a bundled music service. I use Spotify and don’t wish to switch.
As a YouTube Premium subscriber - I still think this move is janky as hell. If my views weren’t worth more to the channels I care about (last I heard, a “red” subscriber is worth an order of magnitude or more than ad view), I’d be out of there out of a sheer distaste for Google’s actions.
I don't even mind ads before videos however the current way ads are being shown is pathetic and ruins the experience. My toddler likes to watch 15 mins of cocomelon while drinking milk and ads show up every few mins in the middle of the nursery rhyme playing. It is extremely infuriating.
I went premium earlier this year to avoid the ads while getting my favourite channels a little revenue. If they ever start showing ads for YouTube Premium users I'm out of there
I've been a Red/Premium subscriber for years, and I'm out the second there's a single ad. I'm annoyed at the increasing number of creators jamming sponsorships into their content. I don't know what my threshold is on that before I just stop following YouTube content altogether, but I'm getting close.
SponsorBlock. Auto-skips that garbage. The overlay over the playback bar is helpful too. If I see that half of it highlighted as a sponsor segment, then I know it's a trash video that isn't worth my time.
I only watch YouTube on my PS4 using Google's app, so I don't think SponsorBlock is an option there. I was really happy with Red/Premium in the early days because I felt like I was getting a great deal for the price. Apparently there aren't enough subscribers, or Google doesn't share enough revenue with creators, or some combination of that and other things--but the experience is getting worse every week. I guess it was good while it lasted.
Reminder that https://lbry.com/ probably has lots of your favorite youtubers on it anyway and if you're a creator it's very easy to have it sync with your channel.
> Yes, the new Terms of Service allow ads to run on videos from non-YPP channels (so long as the video meets ad-friendly guidelines).
So now all these smaller creators will just start their video with "hey cunts, how you doing today?"
So now all these smaller creators will just start their video with "hey cunts, how you doing today?"
Or they could use the opportunity to do activism which necessarily repulses advertisers.
* “Hey kids, here’s how the oil lobby caused climate change and screwed over your generation.” - Bam! No SUV ads.
* “Hey kids, here’s how the oil lobby caused climate change and screwed over your generation.” - Bam! No SUV ads.
I would also like to add that Youtube have relatively recently removed OPML output (which can be used for an RSS feed). This is after they also removed emails for the channels you press the "bell icon". If they do not bring back the RSS feed I'm leaving. I do not want to spend time on their dark-pattern user interface wasting time.
Between this and not paying creators because of some "glitch", showing ads on videos that the creator cannot get paid for (if that be because they don't have "enough" followers or because they got the yellow checkmark), the bullshit preferential treatment of news agencies I could not care less about, becoming the arbiter of truth with "fact checking", randomly deleting channels, zero customer feedback or recourse with a human - the list goes on.
These days, if I want to watch somebody like EEVBlog I can just go to BitChute or Library. Content creators and users are fed up.
Between this and not paying creators because of some "glitch", showing ads on videos that the creator cannot get paid for (if that be because they don't have "enough" followers or because they got the yellow checkmark), the bullshit preferential treatment of news agencies I could not care less about, becoming the arbiter of truth with "fact checking", randomly deleting channels, zero customer feedback or recourse with a human - the list goes on.
These days, if I want to watch somebody like EEVBlog I can just go to BitChute or Library. Content creators and users are fed up.
There's already several articles about Google on the front page. I'm curious why they would be making moves to avoid an anti-trust lawsuit on the one hand with its scaling back of using AMP; while on the other hand, they seem to be actively using their monopoly with YT to generate ad revenue by forcing it on the content creators.
This puts a lot of people in a bad situation. There's no real recourse because the platform has so many users dependent on it, and its not easy to simply yank all of your content and go to another platform. The logistics of doing so are cumbersome and time consuming.
I don't know what the long term solution is, but this just seems very unreasonable. When you're business becomes so reliant on Google, you don't have any alternative but to just take what they do to you as a part of doing business with them.
This puts a lot of people in a bad situation. There's no real recourse because the platform has so many users dependent on it, and its not easy to simply yank all of your content and go to another platform. The logistics of doing so are cumbersome and time consuming.
I don't know what the long term solution is, but this just seems very unreasonable. When you're business becomes so reliant on Google, you don't have any alternative but to just take what they do to you as a part of doing business with them.
That isn't using the monopoly to generate ad revenue it is using their traffic to generate revenue. If anything running YT division at a loss is way worse for antitrust than milking it hard for ads.
Both are different cases. Monopoly (dominant position) isn't bad abusing monopoly in one segment to gain market in another is. So AMP is bad, as they are abusing monopoly in search/news to enter hosting/content platform business. Youtube monetization is not independent of Youtube, so they are free to build upon it.
I don't understand why people are up in arms about this. It's as if people want their cake and eat it, too. Yes, I'm aware of questionable practices that YouTube does, such as monitizing off of dead people, but I'm still astounded that people are upset about this change. Specifically, I'm referring to the expectation that one can upload a video - for free - and allow it be distributed with millions of views to the world - for free - and without ads. Google's revenue model as always been ads so this change shouldn't come as a shock to anyone. And judging from Google's latest quarterly financial results on YouTube's ads success, I'm personally confused why this wasn't done sooner.
I'm up in arms about it because it's illegal.
Google is using their vast profits from an unrelated market, tracking-based advertising, in order to subsidize their product in this market, that of video-streaming services. This is a textbook antitrust violation [1].
It is against the law to price a product below your costs in order to kill off your competitors and then jack up the prices later. This is what they have done by making it ad free for years, only to now force ads on everyone and upsell us to premium.
These laws exist to protect you, the consumer, by ensuring there is proper market competition for your goods and services. You should be up in arms about it because Google has illegally destroyed this market. This is why there are no competitors to YouTube.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing
(edit: replaced link to "Dumping" with "Predatory pricing" since that's probably a better description of the law being broken)
Google is using their vast profits from an unrelated market, tracking-based advertising, in order to subsidize their product in this market, that of video-streaming services. This is a textbook antitrust violation [1].
It is against the law to price a product below your costs in order to kill off your competitors and then jack up the prices later. This is what they have done by making it ad free for years, only to now force ads on everyone and upsell us to premium.
These laws exist to protect you, the consumer, by ensuring there is proper market competition for your goods and services. You should be up in arms about it because Google has illegally destroyed this market. This is why there are no competitors to YouTube.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing
(edit: replaced link to "Dumping" with "Predatory pricing" since that's probably a better description of the law being broken)
Just tired of companies baiting users with free stuff to build market dominance and then dialing up profit extraction once they've killed off all possible competition. That's also your answer to why it wasn't done sooner.
This is not surprising at all, but not much you can do about it even if you see it coming, because other people don't see it coming or don't care. What are you gonna do about it as a user - all the creators are on YouTube. And as a creator - all the users are on YouTube. By design.
This is not surprising at all, but not much you can do about it even if you see it coming, because other people don't see it coming or don't care. What are you gonna do about it as a user - all the creators are on YouTube. And as a creator - all the users are on YouTube. By design.
People expecting something that was free to remain that way forever were a bit naive. Getting upset that someone doing something for you for free is now "charging" is unreasonably entitled.
However. Ads are a blight. Sure, there's something to be said for brand awareness, but if I think back on my ad experience for the last 10 years (which is pretty easy because I haven't seen that many ads in that time) then I can safely say that my conversion rate is approximately zero for video ads. And there's several services/goods that I specifically avoid because their ads offended me.
Youtube thinking that they can fix their financial issues by summoning the ad fairy is just as naive and entitled as people who think that youtube should just be free and ad-less forever.
I'm sure it will work short term. But unless they've really thought out how this transition is going to work as well as how they're going to make sure the ads provide significant value to creators/viewers/advertisers, then I expect a slow decline.
With all of the cloud infrastructure providers out there, it's never been a better time to try launching your own video service. Setup some experimental payment options where the whole thing is paid for by an inventive combination of content creators, viewers, and ads. All tailored by the desires of all three. Want your video to be watched? You can pay to make that happen. Want to watch a video. Same deal. Don't want to pay (on either side). Well we can work out deals with advertisers.
I'm sure youtube can work something out to maintain market dominance. But they have to be paying attention to what they're doing and the announcement makes me wonder if they are.
However. Ads are a blight. Sure, there's something to be said for brand awareness, but if I think back on my ad experience for the last 10 years (which is pretty easy because I haven't seen that many ads in that time) then I can safely say that my conversion rate is approximately zero for video ads. And there's several services/goods that I specifically avoid because their ads offended me.
Youtube thinking that they can fix their financial issues by summoning the ad fairy is just as naive and entitled as people who think that youtube should just be free and ad-less forever.
I'm sure it will work short term. But unless they've really thought out how this transition is going to work as well as how they're going to make sure the ads provide significant value to creators/viewers/advertisers, then I expect a slow decline.
With all of the cloud infrastructure providers out there, it's never been a better time to try launching your own video service. Setup some experimental payment options where the whole thing is paid for by an inventive combination of content creators, viewers, and ads. All tailored by the desires of all three. Want your video to be watched? You can pay to make that happen. Want to watch a video. Same deal. Don't want to pay (on either side). Well we can work out deals with advertisers.
I'm sure youtube can work something out to maintain market dominance. But they have to be paying attention to what they're doing and the announcement makes me wonder if they are.
It looks to me that they are ramping up YT ads because they performed well in their quarterly earnings. I think Google is more self-aware then you are giving them credit.
... I said that. Didnt I? <re-reads own post> Yeah. "I'm sure it will work out short term." That's equivalent to "performed well in their quarterly earnings" right?
YouTube has had a strangle hold on video content for over a decade. I'm sure this change will work out short term ... excuse me ... I'm sure this change will make their quarterly earnings look better temporarily.
Long term, however, I expect this direction to provide a foothold for competitors to take a bigger slice of the video hosting pie.
YouTube has had a strangle hold on video content for over a decade. I'm sure this change will work out short term ... excuse me ... I'm sure this change will make their quarterly earnings look better temporarily.
Long term, however, I expect this direction to provide a foothold for competitors to take a bigger slice of the video hosting pie.
People are (fairly) annoyed because that was the deal Google offered when they were uploading videos.
And if the change shouldn't shock users, then it certainly shouldn't be shocking to Google... In which case maybe they shouldn't have presented it as an option in the first place if they knew they would have to renege on the deal.
And if the change shouldn't shock users, then it certainly shouldn't be shocking to Google... In which case maybe they shouldn't have presented it as an option in the first place if they knew they would have to renege on the deal.
> I'm personally confused why this wasn't done sooner.
It wasn't done sooner as it was extinguishing all competition first. Its a reason we have a few big tech companies and not much else.
It wasn't done sooner as it was extinguishing all competition first. Its a reason we have a few big tech companies and not much else.
I recently downloaded the video of cat listening to classical music, using youtube-dl, just to disable a youtube card obscuring the screen. Between this and "please log in" pop-ups, I can see myself downloading videos before watching.
This move is consistent with the hypothesis that Google is dying. I'll admit though that my predictions on the next place they would start to monetize was not these videos. And I expect this action to see some litigation (basically Google restricts who can be a 'partner' and forces you to allow them to monetize your video without compensation if you aren't a partner, that is basically copyright infringement of the content creators content :-))
My guess had been they would start charging for access to Google Maps or "more than 2 turn by turn directions per week" would cost extra or something.
My guess had been they would start charging for access to Google Maps or "more than 2 turn by turn directions per week" would cost extra or something.
“Dying” is quite the stretch. I think a better description would be “trying to squeeze as much revenue from existing products”.
Yeah. The alternative is they see a lot of big tech regulation headed their way. They preemptively set the rules of the negotiation by pushing their limits that come into question. After that, negotiating down a little makes government funded crackdowns more appealing for everyone, and they’ve still effectively set their own rules. Even if they lose a few million in fights, it’s something they’re committed to fighting.
Perhaps. Maybe it is like a plane that is consistently losing altitude. At some point that becomes unsustainable. My reasoning is as follows;
The only business that makes a profit in all of the Alphabet companies is search advertising. Everything else lives off the excess thrown off by search. Which isn't to say that they don't have other large business revenues, just that they don't make any money. Youtube being the poster child. And it consistently skates the line between slight profit and slight loss and never comes close to the margins that Google would need to make it an independent P&L center.
Then, the profits on search ads have been falling, for at least a decade now. Inside Google that was reflected by cutting costs and deleting benefits. Killing projects that weren't profitable and shedding businesses that weren't ever going to be profitable. Then it started showing up by more an more ads on things. The sad truth is that if you are getting less per ad, you can always add additional "inventory" and keep your numbers looking good. The cost has been that search results have suffered.
I worked there 4 years. Got a good look inside the sausage factory as it were, and frankly the huge profitability of search ads in the beginning instilled a culture that literally couldn't see operational efficiency as a thing. I don't think they will be able to shed that culture before it is too late. But what is too late?
Well if you can't find a business to cover the profits that are evaporating from search, you have two choices, cut costs or monetize more. The former makes you not a 'fun place to work' and cuts into recruiting and productivity, the latter cuts into market share as your product is less and less differentiated. Say what you want about Marissa Mayer, she did get that aspect of Google. And if you're old enough to remember Alta Vista, the "premier" web search engine from 1995, you probably watched how. when it lost its edge against Google, it went crazy with advertising to try to pull up from a collision with bankruptcy.
One need only look at two things, the amount of money Google is increasingly paying to people to send search traffic to it, and the growth of "search engines" like Duck Duck Go which use Bing results to populate their SERPs, to see that Google is losing here. Those costs further erode profits and market share.
And when that erosion hits hard enough it becomes self sustaining, like a dam that has a small crack which becomes a torrent.
A number of people I know from the search business, former Googlers, some who are still Googlers, investors, media, and engineers I met while working on building and deploying the Blekko search engine with their founding team, are all following along as well. I don't think one of them thinks Google is "doing well" at this point. Sure lots of people were skeptical back in 2012 when I started saying it, but now pretty much everyone can see the pattern. Tick, tock, tick, tock.
Now don't misunderstand. We would all love for them to pull out of their current trajectory[1], but temper that hope with observations that they are not. I have seen too many "Gorillas" (in the Geoffrey Moore lexicon) go down this path to have any reasonable expectation that they will survive it. If they follow the classical Silicon Valley playbook, they need to finish their masterpiece "Grand Headquarters Vision" so that they leave behind a tomb for others to remember them by. I have some great memories of TGIF meetings at Google which were held in Building 42, which had been the centerpiece of Silicon Graphics view of its rightful place in the world. I tried to tell them to be respectful of the ghosts that walked the halls, but they didn't understand what I was saying.
[1] Well to be honest a couple of them would be happy to see Google die but I'm not one of them.
The only business that makes a profit in all of the Alphabet companies is search advertising. Everything else lives off the excess thrown off by search. Which isn't to say that they don't have other large business revenues, just that they don't make any money. Youtube being the poster child. And it consistently skates the line between slight profit and slight loss and never comes close to the margins that Google would need to make it an independent P&L center.
Then, the profits on search ads have been falling, for at least a decade now. Inside Google that was reflected by cutting costs and deleting benefits. Killing projects that weren't profitable and shedding businesses that weren't ever going to be profitable. Then it started showing up by more an more ads on things. The sad truth is that if you are getting less per ad, you can always add additional "inventory" and keep your numbers looking good. The cost has been that search results have suffered.
I worked there 4 years. Got a good look inside the sausage factory as it were, and frankly the huge profitability of search ads in the beginning instilled a culture that literally couldn't see operational efficiency as a thing. I don't think they will be able to shed that culture before it is too late. But what is too late?
Well if you can't find a business to cover the profits that are evaporating from search, you have two choices, cut costs or monetize more. The former makes you not a 'fun place to work' and cuts into recruiting and productivity, the latter cuts into market share as your product is less and less differentiated. Say what you want about Marissa Mayer, she did get that aspect of Google. And if you're old enough to remember Alta Vista, the "premier" web search engine from 1995, you probably watched how. when it lost its edge against Google, it went crazy with advertising to try to pull up from a collision with bankruptcy.
One need only look at two things, the amount of money Google is increasingly paying to people to send search traffic to it, and the growth of "search engines" like Duck Duck Go which use Bing results to populate their SERPs, to see that Google is losing here. Those costs further erode profits and market share.
And when that erosion hits hard enough it becomes self sustaining, like a dam that has a small crack which becomes a torrent.
A number of people I know from the search business, former Googlers, some who are still Googlers, investors, media, and engineers I met while working on building and deploying the Blekko search engine with their founding team, are all following along as well. I don't think one of them thinks Google is "doing well" at this point. Sure lots of people were skeptical back in 2012 when I started saying it, but now pretty much everyone can see the pattern. Tick, tock, tick, tock.
Now don't misunderstand. We would all love for them to pull out of their current trajectory[1], but temper that hope with observations that they are not. I have seen too many "Gorillas" (in the Geoffrey Moore lexicon) go down this path to have any reasonable expectation that they will survive it. If they follow the classical Silicon Valley playbook, they need to finish their masterpiece "Grand Headquarters Vision" so that they leave behind a tomb for others to remember them by. I have some great memories of TGIF meetings at Google which were held in Building 42, which had been the centerpiece of Silicon Graphics view of its rightful place in the world. I tried to tell them to be respectful of the ghosts that walked the halls, but they didn't understand what I was saying.
[1] Well to be honest a couple of them would be happy to see Google die but I'm not one of them.
This is not workable in Germany. There are huge fines for running YouTube businesses without putting business details at every location your video appears on the internet.
German State administrators have sent out such fines simply because videos made in Germany (even in English) which have advertising do not carry such additional business information.
These administrators will not know, nor care if you are in the YouTube Partner Program or not. They will simply send out the fines, which could bankrupt a small hobbyist.
This affects me directly, and I would have to remove my hobby channel from YouTube if they go ahead with this.
German State administrators have sent out such fines simply because videos made in Germany (even in English) which have advertising do not carry such additional business information.
These administrators will not know, nor care if you are in the YouTube Partner Program or not. They will simply send out the fines, which could bankrupt a small hobbyist.
This affects me directly, and I would have to remove my hobby channel from YouTube if they go ahead with this.
Can't you just put your business information at the start/end of your videos?
If I were a business, the answer is no, the regulations are very strict.
But I am not a business, I'm a hobbyist. I derive no income from my channel.
By my estimation you would need at least five employees in Germany to run an online business properly, as the law that governs businesses is voluminous and bureaucratic. I could not afford to run a business.
For example, if I were a business in Germany, other YouTubers could sue me simply because I didn't follow packaging or E-waste laws in one of my videos. And that is to say nothing of surprise laws that you couldn't even predict would be laws.
Also, under German law I'd need permission from my existing employer to run a business, which they would not likely give.
But I am not a business, I'm a hobbyist. I derive no income from my channel.
By my estimation you would need at least five employees in Germany to run an online business properly, as the law that governs businesses is voluminous and bureaucratic. I could not afford to run a business.
For example, if I were a business in Germany, other YouTubers could sue me simply because I didn't follow packaging or E-waste laws in one of my videos. And that is to say nothing of surprise laws that you couldn't even predict would be laws.
Also, under German law I'd need permission from my existing employer to run a business, which they would not likely give.
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I always kind of predicted that services like YouTube will eventually end up just like cable TV when it comes to ads (formerly known as "commercials").
I think even services that you pay for (like Netflix) will eventually get there.
I was at my parents house the other day and they watch a lot of cable TV. The amount of commercials was shocking since I'm so used to streaming. I kept thinking "why do we still have to watch commercials if we're paying for the service?".
Then I realized it's only a matter of time before Netflix, Hulu, etc. start doing the same thing. Hopefully I'm wrong.
I think even services that you pay for (like Netflix) will eventually get there.
I was at my parents house the other day and they watch a lot of cable TV. The amount of commercials was shocking since I'm so used to streaming. I kept thinking "why do we still have to watch commercials if we're paying for the service?".
Then I realized it's only a matter of time before Netflix, Hulu, etc. start doing the same thing. Hopefully I'm wrong.
I agree with your prediction. I'm old enough to remember when cable was first rolled out and a big selling point for it was commercial free channels. And, as you mentioned, look at it now. Channels like TBS and TNT take it to such extremes too. A movie with a runtime of an hour and twenty minutes takes 3 hours to watch! If not for DVR I probably wouldn't watch any network or cable TV at all these days.
What Netflix and other the streaming service demonstrate is that the problem seems to be at the mainstream producer end. The earliest started out the most pro-consumer and then over time got more demanding and even started their own streaming platforms to try to get in on thr action and made the user experience worse for consumers with things like paid and ad subcription tiers. If a company launches their own storefront and promotes it and claims it is to reduce costs and pass on savings they are lying to you. Breaking into a new market is expensive and risky. Initial sales are essentially a use of their marketing budget. The true reason is that their demands are rejected by the existing storefronts which usually means they are too aggressive in demands for margin or control.
They have the legal right to do this of course but we don't have to like it and the impact on the market and can choose against them if you believe that their content is not worth commercials and rising prices.
They have the legal right to do this of course but we don't have to like it and the impact on the market and can choose against them if you believe that their content is not worth commercials and rising prices.
People are upset that YouTube is charging a hosting fee? Just put your video someplace else. They aren't a monopoly and if people talk with their "feet" then YT will try something else.
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Not long ago Google has automatically enabled mid-roll ads for all videos longer than a certain length [0]. Most likely, its net effect is that more ads are played and as a result, YouTube's ad revenue has increased.
Now they implement a similar measure whose net effect would probably be comparable - i.e. an increased ad revenue.
It is perhaps logical for Google to behave like that, purely from the financial point of view. However, they could have done it a long time ago. It is unclear to me why they believe that the right time to introduce such measures is now.
Maybe they believe that their user base is currently large enough and stable enough that the decreased comfort levels while using YouTube would not motivate a critical portion of them to leave. It remains to be seen whether that is true.
Or, perhaps, their ad revenue growth is slowing [1] and they are trying to compensate for it even by using measures whose long term effects are unclear.
[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/60293363?hl=en [1] https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/youtube-google-q2-ad-r...
Now they implement a similar measure whose net effect would probably be comparable - i.e. an increased ad revenue.
It is perhaps logical for Google to behave like that, purely from the financial point of view. However, they could have done it a long time ago. It is unclear to me why they believe that the right time to introduce such measures is now.
Maybe they believe that their user base is currently large enough and stable enough that the decreased comfort levels while using YouTube would not motivate a critical portion of them to leave. It remains to be seen whether that is true.
Or, perhaps, their ad revenue growth is slowing [1] and they are trying to compensate for it even by using measures whose long term effects are unclear.
[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/60293363?hl=en [1] https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/youtube-google-q2-ad-r...
This probably isn't the case, but would be kinda funny if Youtube keeps a list of unpopular policy changes they'd like to make, and rolls them out each time they start to push into some backend infrastructure limit or need to do a heavy migration.
I bet a lot of devops would love a 'reduce user usage by 20% for a week' button.
I bet a lot of devops would love a 'reduce user usage by 20% for a week' button.
I hope they let creators decide where the ads go. Because otherwise, this is going to destroy ASMR videos. I can see it now. Person with insomnia listening to someone softly picking a mic with a q-tip about to drift off when all of a sudden HI LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT CAR INSURANCE.
From looking casually into the community, those channels have a lot of videos with millions and sometimes tens of millions of views. All of that is going to potentially migrate to somewhere else.
From looking casually into the community, those channels have a lot of videos with millions and sometimes tens of millions of views. All of that is going to potentially migrate to somewhere else.
Where are they going to migrate to that is going to host a video for tens of millions of views for free with no ads?
Maybe they could use a Peertube instance
or LBRY.
It drives me bananas that the ads are always so much louder than the content. There's a law against that for broadcast television, but it doesn't apply to internet content. (It may not apply to cable/netflix either? I dunno.)
I don't watch youtube on my phone anymore. IMHO this is profoundly bad for Google. The last time I bought a phone, having a bigger screen was one of the considerations. I don't remember how much it was, but I spent like $800 on it. Not anymore. My last phone was $350. I use for a lot less stuff. Mostly just texting and discord. So Google has lost out twice- once for just less watching of youtube, but also less mobile device usage, which likely earns Google quite a bit more from that the ads.
I don't watch youtube on my phone anymore. IMHO this is profoundly bad for Google. The last time I bought a phone, having a bigger screen was one of the considerations. I don't remember how much it was, but I spent like $800 on it. Not anymore. My last phone was $350. I use for a lot less stuff. Mostly just texting and discord. So Google has lost out twice- once for just less watching of youtube, but also less mobile device usage, which likely earns Google quite a bit more from that the ads.
I've stopped watching songs over 8/10 minutes as a result of this. I'd be glad to watch a reasonable ad up front, but when I see a midroll, I bail.
Edit: I need to emphasise that the ads were occasional, and probably YouTube will be more agressive this time. I've also realised that many of you are using some sort of ad-blocker, so you might not felt the changes when it was (silently) rolled out years ago, but this is from my experience using YouTube on devices which I cannot install an ad-blocker (like in some instructional videos for certain robots which some companies decided to use YouTube for). I have put this edit on top because it seems that some HN commenters do not read beyond a few sentence.
Original text: I'm sorry if I seem dismissive, but isn't this the status quo already (like years ago)? I don't necessarily endorse it, but from what I've read on the article and the announcement it seems that it has rewritten the terms to clarify that YouTube/Google can monetise videos outside of YPP programme (and some other changes that are not in scope of the argument), so is this just net zero?
(Also: if a YPP creator has decided to not monetize a video, the video gets less ads which its proceeds goes directly to Google. This has been the status quo at least 2016(?)ish so this might be just to clarify that this indeed happens.)
Original text: I'm sorry if I seem dismissive, but isn't this the status quo already (like years ago)? I don't necessarily endorse it, but from what I've read on the article and the announcement it seems that it has rewritten the terms to clarify that YouTube/Google can monetise videos outside of YPP programme (and some other changes that are not in scope of the argument), so is this just net zero?
(Also: if a YPP creator has decided to not monetize a video, the video gets less ads which its proceeds goes directly to Google. This has been the status quo at least 2016(?)ish so this might be just to clarify that this indeed happens.)
If you're referring to in-video ads, then no.
At present, if you choose not to monetize a video, no ads get shown unless a third part makes a copyright claim on your video.
I'm not quite sure about the situation with ads that show up in the corner of the page - those are unobtrusive enough that I'm used to mentally tuning them out.
At present, if you choose not to monetize a video, no ads get shown unless a third part makes a copyright claim on your video.
I'm not quite sure about the situation with ads that show up in the corner of the page - those are unobtrusive enough that I'm used to mentally tuning them out.
> If you're referring to in-video ads, then no.
Pardon me? I'm pretty sure that there are (occasional) in-video ads for channels not under YPP and explicitly-demonetized YPP videos even before 2020. (and I'm pretty sure that they were in no way claimed by others at all)
Pardon me? I'm pretty sure that there are (occasional) in-video ads for channels not under YPP and explicitly-demonetized YPP videos even before 2020. (and I'm pretty sure that they were in no way claimed by others at all)
Examples? Happy to be proven wrong on this.
> Edit: I've realised that many of you are using some sort of ad-blocker, so you might not felt the changes when it was (silently) rolled out years ago, but this is from my experience using YouTube on devices which I cannot install an ad-blocker (like in some instructional videos for certain robots which some companies decided to use YouTube for).
I do not have definite proof for this, as I said on the top comment it is rather occasional, but I'm pretty sure that this happened to me on these videos (will update as I remember them):
- Tom Scott (which is definitely in YPP in 2018) has a video titled Stories I Can't Tell [1]. At the time I've watched it for the first time, it has a in-video ad at the tail of the video even though he explicitly said that the video is not monetised (and therefore it might be Google getting the money). Notably, he prepares his videos days or weeks in advance so I'm confident he indeed turn off monetisation on this.
- From time-to-time, I have accessed channels for work purposes. One of them is Fisher Scientific [2], which does have ads occasionally despite the fact that it shouldn't have (and obviously they wouldn't have bothered to submit YPP).
- Similarly, YouTube channels using Google Workspace accounts do serve an ad from time-to-time. Again, it is occasional, but from what my child has experienced, it does happen even with educational accounts (they have since moved to using Google Drive, although it is cumbersome since there are no features such as playlists).
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjl9CpAirtE
2: https://www.youtube.com/user/FisherScientificUK/
I do not have definite proof for this, as I said on the top comment it is rather occasional, but I'm pretty sure that this happened to me on these videos (will update as I remember them):
- Tom Scott (which is definitely in YPP in 2018) has a video titled Stories I Can't Tell [1]. At the time I've watched it for the first time, it has a in-video ad at the tail of the video even though he explicitly said that the video is not monetised (and therefore it might be Google getting the money). Notably, he prepares his videos days or weeks in advance so I'm confident he indeed turn off monetisation on this.
- From time-to-time, I have accessed channels for work purposes. One of them is Fisher Scientific [2], which does have ads occasionally despite the fact that it shouldn't have (and obviously they wouldn't have bothered to submit YPP).
- Similarly, YouTube channels using Google Workspace accounts do serve an ad from time-to-time. Again, it is occasional, but from what my child has experienced, it does happen even with educational accounts (they have since moved to using Google Drive, although it is cumbersome since there are no features such as playlists).
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjl9CpAirtE
2: https://www.youtube.com/user/FisherScientificUK/
>1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjl9CpAirtE
I pulled up a private browser session to make sure I was not logged in, and the video was served ad free.
I pulled up a private browser session to make sure I was not logged in, and the video was served ad free.
It seems that HN put me on a cooldown, but as I've said it was occasional.
For longer videos, YouTube tends to put not just an ad or two at the beginning, but also in the middle of the video. It can be pretty jarring to be listening to a quiet video, and then 10 minutes in, an obnoxiously loud ad starts playing.
No idea if the creators opt in to this “feature” (I bet they don’t; it’s probably either all or nothing with ads), but it definitely exists.
No idea if the creators opt in to this “feature” (I bet they don’t; it’s probably either all or nothing with ads), but it definitely exists.
> No idea if the creators opt in to this “feature” (I bet they don’t; it’s probably either all or nothing with ads), but it definitely exists.
You used to be able to opt-in to mid-roll ads. A few months ago, YouTube switched it to an opt-out system, helpfully enabling them for all then-existing videos that hadn't opted in:
> Starting in late July, videos that are longer than eight minutes will be eligible for mid-roll ads. As part of this change, mid-roll ads will be turned on for all eligible existing videos and future video uploads, including those videos where you may have previously opted out of mid-roll ads. Videos that already have mid-roll ads turned on will not be impacted.
(As I understand it, there is no way to disable the mid-roll ad on all videos, so you'd have to manually flip it for every single video. How kind of YouTube.)
You used to be able to opt-in to mid-roll ads. A few months ago, YouTube switched it to an opt-out system, helpfully enabling them for all then-existing videos that hadn't opted in:
> Starting in late July, videos that are longer than eight minutes will be eligible for mid-roll ads. As part of this change, mid-roll ads will be turned on for all eligible existing videos and future video uploads, including those videos where you may have previously opted out of mid-roll ads. Videos that already have mid-roll ads turned on will not be impacted.
(As I understand it, there is no way to disable the mid-roll ad on all videos, so you'd have to manually flip it for every single video. How kind of YouTube.)
Had this yesterday - watching a "Tangerine Dream LIVE" video and about 3 minutes into the first track got some advert for what I think was some kind of UK grime / street band. The contrast was jarring enough that YouTube got closed.
Worse though that on June (or was it July? Regardless, this year) most YPP members' videos were explicitly opted-in again on mid-roll ads despite some of them explicitly turning it off already.
[deleted]
The norm is already getting to be 2 unskippable pre-roll ads, the creator’s sponsor read (not uncommonly > 3 minutes long), several badly timed mid-roll ads, and a post roll ad.
The ads themselves are mostly repeats to the point that I’m getting an aversion to the companies and products they try to sell.
Goolgle is clearly hoping to get more consumers on YT premium but that’s just priced too high IMHO.
When I'm having a transcendental youtube experience, last thing I want is to have is an ad disrupt my focus. It disturbs the "flow".
Another reason why I feel obligated to subscribe to YT premium as an avid YT user.
I only use YouTube when searching for an instructional video, eg how to find the hidden reward in a game, how to cook or prepare a recipe, etc.
With ads on it’s a nightmare as when searching it takes a number of videos until I find the one I am looking for and each time I have to wait for 30 sec ad.
It’s so time wasting that I stopped using it.
I hope they continue the trend and the Google monster dies from inside.
With ads on it’s a nightmare as when searching it takes a number of videos until I find the one I am looking for and each time I have to wait for 30 sec ad.
It’s so time wasting that I stopped using it.
I hope they continue the trend and the Google monster dies from inside.
Honestly I don’t mind this. Ads for free video hosting is a fair offer and at least one can buy ad-free YouTube.
Of course I’d love YouTube and thus Google’s ad empire to not be so dominant, but to the extent that that is fine, this is fine too.
As a user what really sucks is that despite paying to get rid of ads I still have to put up with the ones creators include within the video itself.
Of course I’d love YouTube and thus Google’s ad empire to not be so dominant, but to the extent that that is fine, this is fine too.
As a user what really sucks is that despite paying to get rid of ads I still have to put up with the ones creators include within the video itself.
Is there any detail as to whether or not they'll show ads on demonetized videos/accounts and not pay the creator?
If they do that, that seems perverse. Isn't the purpose of demonetization to prevent showing ads on videos where the videos aren't conducive to showing ads? If they show ads on such videos then that seems to defeat their argument.
If they do that, that seems perverse. Isn't the purpose of demonetization to prevent showing ads on videos where the videos aren't conducive to showing ads? If they show ads on such videos then that seems to defeat their argument.
Can’t wait to have our ambient classical music interrupted by Pizza hut.
youtube-dl it is
youtube-dl it is
Man I miss the old youtube, you can hardly find those cool zero budget "filmed on dad's camcorder" kind of videos anymore with all of the high budget 10 minute production videos being dumped onto it. I've had to start watching at 1.25x speed, I think they slow some videos down to hit the 10 minute mark. Youtube sucks.
Ugh. I don't want to make Youtube a career or anything, so I figured if I ever reach 1000 subscribers I'd disable them since I really don't like watching ads for myself.
Now Youtube is going to put ads on my stuff, and I don't get any money for it, so really the worst of both worlds.
Now Youtube is going to put ads on my stuff, and I don't get any money for it, so really the worst of both worlds.
I suggest creators move to PeerTube and LibrePay, YouTube is strong only because other platforms lack content.
Ads on YouTube have become annoying enough to make me hesitate before following a link to the site.
I really wonder how much further they can push this without either driving users to using ad blockers or creators to upload to other platforms.
Unfortunately, I suspect the answer is "pretty long"...
I really wonder how much further they can push this without either driving users to using ad blockers or creators to upload to other platforms.
Unfortunately, I suspect the answer is "pretty long"...
Unfortunately, I suspect the answer is "pretty long"...
I'm not so sure.
I'm only a casual viewer of YouTube. I don't engage in any of the account-based stuff, just watch the occasional video hosted there. But even in the content I've seen, it's clear that the semi-pro creators -- the kind of people using schemes like Patreon these days, and maybe placements as they get more successful -- are very aware of how they come across.
In particular, they might already be hosting their content on multiple services, particularly those who livestream events of whatever kind, where they might stream on Twitch one day and YT the next. Those who are successful enough to make significant money from their videos are well aware of anything affecting their video quality, audience numbers, and ultimately revenue.
I doubt many of them will have any great loyalty to YT if it becomes too awkward or expensive, and I'm sure many of them already have accounts on other services and the bulk of their followers would know where else to find them if YT shut down their accounts overnight.
I'm not so sure.
I'm only a casual viewer of YouTube. I don't engage in any of the account-based stuff, just watch the occasional video hosted there. But even in the content I've seen, it's clear that the semi-pro creators -- the kind of people using schemes like Patreon these days, and maybe placements as they get more successful -- are very aware of how they come across.
In particular, they might already be hosting their content on multiple services, particularly those who livestream events of whatever kind, where they might stream on Twitch one day and YT the next. Those who are successful enough to make significant money from their videos are well aware of anything affecting their video quality, audience numbers, and ultimately revenue.
I doubt many of them will have any great loyalty to YT if it becomes too awkward or expensive, and I'm sure many of them already have accounts on other services and the bulk of their followers would know where else to find them if YT shut down their accounts overnight.
I occasionally watch YT videos on my Fire TV Stick. Although ads are technically skippable, the on-screen directions don't actually work. I was watching a concert the other day and got stuck in a 3 minute ad that I couldn't escape. I just exited YT.
My kids (like most kids) spend a ton of time on YouTube. We pay for YouTube Premium to remove ads (no-brainer). How does YT compensate creators when the viewer is a Premium customer? Is it the same rate, or better than non-paid viewers?
Linus Sebastian from Linus Media Group has said somewhere that a YouTube premium viewer is worth several times as much as an ad-supported viewer apparently. Apologies for no citation on this.
Found the video where he says this: https://youtu.be/PRQVzPEyldc
Thanks. This makes me feel slightly better about my kids' YouTube consumption and my decision to pay for Premium.
I don't like Google very much, but this seems reasonable. The huge amount of engineering effort that goes into maintaining the platform isn't free.
It would be cool if creators could pay Youtube to keep their videos online without ads.
It would be cool if creators could pay Youtube to keep their videos online without ads.
I rarely watch Youtube on mobile anymore because of the ads.
Desktop is still usable thanks to adblockers, but if it becomes more obnoxious that will stop too.
I could buy Premium but not at the current price tag, I don't use it that much.
I could buy Premium but not at the current price tag, I don't use it that much.
Unless you want the pennies you might get from a YouTube video, please use Vimeo for uploaded classes, tutorials, etc. The lack of ads, the higher quality interface, all make the user experience so much more pleasant.
I wonder if YouTube is getting too big for Google to handle or not. I pay for YouTube premium but find YouTube slow and buggy most of time. YouTube's latest app often break existing functionality. And all features of YouTube premium are available in other free YouTube apps too where you pay nothing.
I pay for YouTube premium because it's only 120₹(2$) in my country and I like to spend a lot of time on YouTube, a lot more than Twitch or Netflix or any other streaming app.
As such I am in favour of this move it it means that YouTube will perform better but I am not sure anymore.
I pay for YouTube premium because it's only 120₹(2$) in my country and I like to spend a lot of time on YouTube, a lot more than Twitch or Netflix or any other streaming app.
As such I am in favour of this move it it means that YouTube will perform better but I am not sure anymore.
At least with TV, ads were scheduled and expected. The thing I hate the most about Youtube ads is how the intermission happens randomly and unexpectedly. It really spoils the whole experience of watching videos.
TV ads were built into TV shows as well, and were very jarring:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCLFut6pAa8
The ads are everywhere and in everything, and it has basically stopped me from being able to enjoy much of media. But consuming media is a poor use of my time anyway, so it seems like a benefit for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCLFut6pAa8
The ads are everywhere and in everything, and it has basically stopped me from being able to enjoy much of media. But consuming media is a poor use of my time anyway, so it seems like a benefit for me.
I wonder if YouTube could at least give creators the option to insert markers where they feel an ad would be least intrusive?
So at least, since they are forced to show ads, the ads can be at the right place?
So at least, since they are forced to show ads, the ads can be at the right place?
YouTube does give creators the ability to insert ad markers. Not sure if it's available to everyone though.
As someone how makes a tiny amount on YouTube who only puts ads on some videos, I guess this means I can monetize every video I upload and the users won’t notice a difference. Annoying but it’s YouTube.
Google is fundamentally an advertising company and I genuinely don't understand why people trust their email and web browser software to what is essentially a fancy version of DoubleClick.
After having tried Youtube Premium to remove ads, it's almost jarring to see ads in a Youtube video.
YT seems to be increasingly prioritizing being ad delivery network over being a content delivery network.
YT seems to be increasingly prioritizing being ad delivery network over being a content delivery network.
Usually these issues are not a function of policy, but of degree and application.
Some types of ads are really innocuous, some not so much.
If there were only a 4 second ad at the start we'd be fine with it, but it'll be a 'click to skip', there'll be more than one, it will interrupt, the ads will be loud and annoying etc..
Product Managers are always under pressure to increase revenue, but they never want to contemplate the long-run effects of the qualitative reduction in the value of their product.
Some types of ads are really innocuous, some not so much.
If there were only a 4 second ad at the start we'd be fine with it, but it'll be a 'click to skip', there'll be more than one, it will interrupt, the ads will be loud and annoying etc..
Product Managers are always under pressure to increase revenue, but they never want to contemplate the long-run effects of the qualitative reduction in the value of their product.
Wait, cerators can choose whether there are ads? Meaning every time I see an ad before a video it’s because the uploader thought it’s worth making $0.50 a year?
[deleted]
Time to ditch YouTube I guess.
I understand they want to be _profitable_ by forcing users to pay those $9.99/month, but this aggressive campaign against free users is really really bad.
I understand they want to be _profitable_ by forcing users to pay those $9.99/month, but this aggressive campaign against free users is really really bad.
> “YouTubers need some kind of union,” says Brax. “I’m not sure how that would work or anything but they can’t just keep getting away with killing off small creators like this.”
Someone should tell this guy: https://youtubersunion.org/
In fact this is already one of their demands (more or less):
* Monetize everyone - Bring back monetization for smaller channels.
Someone should tell this guy: https://youtubersunion.org/
In fact this is already one of their demands (more or less):
* Monetize everyone - Bring back monetization for smaller channels.
This is probably a good thing because it'll force companies to move to other video platform that let them host videos without ads. It might drive up competition in video space, which is a good thing. Youtube has been monopolizing video space for far too long because they were operating without much regards for profits, killing their competitors that don't have a deep pocket.
Good point. I would like to see some alternatives for youtube. Decent alternatives.
The number of videos that now have sponsorships and ads embedded in the video (which to me is 100x worse than pre-roll ads - especially because I pay for Youtube premium) is probably a significant cause here. It has made Youtube a far worse product for me. If you watch anything DIY or car related then most of the content you're consuming is just a long-form advertisement.
YouTube already does ads on every page right? The ones in the top right corner of the watch page for example.
I think this is now referring to in-video ads.
I think this is now referring to in-video ads.
Yes this is referring to in-video ads.
Yes... Yes... Join the Dark Side...
Honestly, it too too long. Should have been sooner, before other YouTube competitors slided into irrelevance.
"Dumping", anyone?
Honestly, it too too long. Should have been sooner, before other YouTube competitors slided into irrelevance.
"Dumping", anyone?
[deleted]
I feel a rebirth of BitTorrent in the wings honestly. Symmetrical connections are getting more popular and inline (creator made) sponsorships have become the norm, so really letting all grab your video data is less of a problem.
Since the shape of video content downloads is heavily weighted towards newer releases, backing BT with HTTP seeds looks a lot more viable.
Since the shape of video content downloads is heavily weighted towards newer releases, backing BT with HTTP seeds looks a lot more viable.
I am fine with ads but having multiple ads in a row gets on my nerves.
The worst thing is that you have to skip them, so you need to interact with the tv. If the ads were reasonably long that would be fine, but sometimes there are WHOLE EPISODES OF OTHER SHOWS as ads (sometimes as long as 30 mins!). I just want to watch something without searching for the remote all the time.
The worst thing is that you have to skip them, so you need to interact with the tv. If the ads were reasonably long that would be fine, but sometimes there are WHOLE EPISODES OF OTHER SHOWS as ads (sometimes as long as 30 mins!). I just want to watch something without searching for the remote all the time.
One of the ads I saw recently was, literally, an hour long video.
1. "Youtube partner program" can be terminated after 6 months of zero interaction with users, though creator shall reapply.
2. Youtube shall run ads on non YPP videos.
So idea seems to be, takeaway 'ideal creators' money from them to 'Youtube'.
Is it fair to disassociate creator from "YPP/ads share" for 6 month/more dis-engagement?
So idea seems to be, takeaway 'ideal creators' money from them to 'Youtube'.
Is it fair to disassociate creator from "YPP/ads share" for 6 month/more dis-engagement?
Oh boy. If this applies to embedded youtube videos on other sites this is going to create a real mess on the web for a while. Lots of companies hosting videos on youtube and embedding them on their site with the expectation that visitors won't be bombarded with ads (potentially by direct competitors). Should be interesting to see how this plays out.
Haven't seen any root-level comments asking, so I'll throw this out there: Are there any good alternatives to YouTube?
A clever, and decidedly evil, move on Google's part.
Showing ads on content produced by creators who aren't a part of the partners program, means they get to pocket the full ad revenue.
There is already not enough ad money to go around, hence the Adpocalypse a few years back.
Now Google is skimming even more of the cream.
This is a company which deserves to lose, and I, for one, can't wait.
Showing ads on content produced by creators who aren't a part of the partners program, means they get to pocket the full ad revenue.
There is already not enough ad money to go around, hence the Adpocalypse a few years back.
Now Google is skimming even more of the cream.
This is a company which deserves to lose, and I, for one, can't wait.
I wonder how this would affect the ASMR[1] community. They rely on immersive experience and most of the time at high volume. Now with ads popping up randomly people might not watch it anymore.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASMR
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASMR
Good point. Meditation videos will also be ruined.
What about creators that did want them, and YT decided that I didn’t have enough subscribers so they demonetized me?
I’ve put up some useful videos on a few technical tasks and was happy with the few dollars/mo/video they were kicking me, but it wasn’t subscribable content; I solved your problem, why would you come back?
I’ve put up some useful videos on a few technical tasks and was happy with the few dollars/mo/video they were kicking me, but it wasn’t subscribable content; I solved your problem, why would you come back?
I use YouTube to listen to guided meditations. Getting ads in the middle will be a new way to test my equanimity
I like putting "Cat TV" on for my cat.
No matter how many ads they show him, I'm certain he won't be buying anything because of it.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPJXfmxMYAoH02CFudZxmgg
No matter how many ads they show him, I'm certain he won't be buying anything because of it.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPJXfmxMYAoH02CFudZxmgg
Guess I need to figure out how to stream videos with uBock-Origin from a PC to a iPad, to kill the ads
I wouldn't be blocking ads if there weren't so many of them and they weren't so obnoxious. The day I can't use adblocks I am probably rarely going to visit youtube. And I'm using youtube too little anyway to pay for a monthy paid membership with youtube.
We should be fighting for compute equality: everyone should have their own server, and not on the cloud.
At what point does the social contract between consumers and Google, whereby we get loads of freebies and they get to know everything about us, become void?
It looks like we're all getting played for suckers because they still get all of our info while their services are gradually restricted.
It looks like we're all getting played for suckers because they still get all of our info while their services are gradually restricted.
It is strange. I noticed all the ads lately, sometimes even 2 in a row.
But thinking about it I can't remember a single ad. Today more and more people have an ad filter in their head. This means that Google earns a lot of money from ads that have a lot of exposure but almost zero effect.
But thinking about it I can't remember a single ad. Today more and more people have an ad filter in their head. This means that Google earns a lot of money from ads that have a lot of exposure but almost zero effect.
I've uploaded videos to YouTube that I've intentionally intended to be ad-free. I simply use it as a video hosting platform, since it's been more convenient and performant than rolling my own.
Is there a way for a content-publisher to pay Google to not show videos on our ads?
Is there a way for a content-publisher to pay Google to not show videos on our ads?
How many times do we need to keep telling all these cloud-native folks to stop building their livelihoods on a foundation made of straw
This sort of shit is inevitable. Is there a single free web service that's been successful and kept to its core promises way back when?
This sort of shit is inevitable. Is there a single free web service that's been successful and kept to its core promises way back when?
This sucks. It would be nice if they at least offered an option to pay for hosting without ads. Moving all the videos to another provider will take a lot of time. Any suggestions btw? I would prefer a provider that charges for hosting and that's their business model.
Google is going greedy.
[tin foil hat on]
Perhaps this is signs of something else going very wrong and they trying the plug the revenue gap. Google Photos size limit last week, More Youtube ads now.
At this going , I wouldn't be surprised if they bring in some tighter limits / pricing plans on GMail too.
[tin foil hat on]
Perhaps this is signs of something else going very wrong and they trying the plug the revenue gap. Google Photos size limit last week, More Youtube ads now.
At this going , I wouldn't be surprised if they bring in some tighter limits / pricing plans on GMail too.
For content creators: just say "Free Hong Kong" and voila - no more ads in your video!
Does anyone know of any good 'static video hosting' tools?
I'm thinking of an easy to use tool that would chunk videos and create manifests for DASH, generate a thumbnail, and do whatever else you'd need to do to host streaming videos on your own blog.
I'm thinking of an easy to use tool that would chunk videos and create manifests for DASH, generate a thumbnail, and do whatever else you'd need to do to host streaming videos on your own blog.
I bet the decision comes after the surge of VOD upload by Twitch streamers trying to not get caught by DMCA.
You can say bye bye to the thousands of relaxing ASMR and ambiance videos on YouTube.
Thanks NewPipe and youtube-dl for allowing us to watch ad-less videos.
You can say bye bye to the thousands of relaxing ASMR and ambiance videos on YouTube.
Thanks NewPipe and youtube-dl for allowing us to watch ad-less videos.
I think if people knew the real size (in every sense of the word) of tech companies, they would understand the urgency in breaking them up. It is beneficial for every one on the planet. Competition is good, no competition is bad.
I wish I could somehow manage the ads...
I know that isn't youtube's goal but just watching some neato science videos with my kids ... I got some surprisingly explicit male grooming ads... and some ads that IMO were awfully suggestive.
I know that isn't youtube's goal but just watching some neato science videos with my kids ... I got some surprisingly explicit male grooming ads... and some ads that IMO were awfully suggestive.
[deleted]
Think of all those embedded youtube videos on commercial websites used for product demonstration or in instruction manuals, now google can run ads for your competitor right on your company website.
Kind of funny to me actually
Kind of funny to me actually
Youtube ran for years without ads. Recently they have greatly increased the number of ads. Now they are even putting them on all channels?
Pretty much confirming predatory pricing. Hence why Google is up on antitrust laws.
Pretty much confirming predatory pricing. Hence why Google is up on antitrust laws.
An independent filmmaker and game dev I follow just deleted 99% of his videos after getting the email about this. I wish I didn’t try on it so much. There’s not a real alternative
When I see an ad I then think if video is worth watching ads. Usually it's not, so I close it few seconds after an ad pops up. It's positive for me as I waste less time on YT
I wonder if somehow creators could gift YouTube Premium to their subscribers so they still wouldn’t see ads? (Could a sponsor cover YT premium costs for say a month at a time?)
Now is the time HN. We need a decentralised YouTube alternate.
The trick is, in the app, to pull down the video and close it by tapping the X
Quickly reopen by tapping on the thumbnail, it shan't show ads. If it doesn't work do it 2-4 times
Quickly reopen by tapping on the thumbnail, it shan't show ads. If it doesn't work do it 2-4 times
Will this also affect your youtube embeds into your Website?
What does it mean if your Youtube videos are unlisted?
The videos are educational meant for classrooms only content.
You still get ads no matter what?
Time to invest in a a Vimeo account or ugh.. self host.
The videos are educational meant for classrooms only content.
You still get ads no matter what?
Time to invest in a a Vimeo account or ugh.. self host.
I tried to export my subscriptions list as OPML today... Youtube has removed that option now. You cannot easily grab the RSS list of your subscribers anymore.
Will the creators make money even if they don’t want it?
The best creators are demonetized, anyway. They wouldn't want a toilet paper ad to be besmirched by association with intelligent entertainment.
If this is the case, I'm really unclear why they're not revenue sharing with users who create the videos. That seems like the real dick move, here
Has anybody managed to make YouTube Vanced's sign in work with legacy GSuite accounts? It's the only thing preventing me from switching to it.
Does this concern embedded videos on your website as well? I don't want my potential customers to see a youtube ad before my explainer video starts.
Too weird to me since I have an YouTube premium subscription (because I bought Google Music way back), not non of this affects me.
Is it getting so bad recently?
Is it getting so bad recently?
So we now support the idea of user unfriendly software cos it means we use it less and get happier. This is a weird industry to work in.
I hope I'll be able to choose where the ads appear in my own videos. Ads playing in the middle of a sentence are really annoying.
I wonder how they’ll select the ads. YouTube hosts some material that some brands might not want to be associated with.
If everyone bought YouTube Premium, would content providers make money anymore? Or would all the money go to google?
Content creators would make significantly more money.
It's hard to find good information on exactly how _much_ more. I've seen estimates anywhere from 2x (https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/9agg5f/how_does_yo...) to 20x (https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/totalbiscuit-youtube-red-p...).
It's hard to find good information on exactly how _much_ more. I've seen estimates anywhere from 2x (https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/9agg5f/how_does_yo...) to 20x (https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/totalbiscuit-youtube-red-p...).
I have a humble channel with 3,281 subs and 108 videos. My boycott starts today. Deleting all content from YouTube.
I am waiting for the day when they will start threatening of discontinuing accounts using ad blocking software
Please use newpipe if you are on android. Your watching ads of your favourite small youtuber wont get them paid anyways because of this so make your experience a bit cleaner. Use newpipe.
Also, start looking into peertube. While its still long ways from a competing software, its going strong and the more people join it, the better will be the network effect.
Also, start looking into peertube. While its still long ways from a competing software, its going strong and the more people join it, the better will be the network effect.
Not sure why this is downvoted but this kind of thing is a good example for why I'm glad things like peertube exist.
Youtube was down for a few hours a couple days ago and thats when I realized that just about every video on the internet is now exclusively hosted on Youtube.
Even visiting the homepage of some sites, they'll have a Youtube "Here's what our product is"-type video that was no longer working.
Youtube was down for a few hours a couple days ago and thats when I realized that just about every video on the internet is now exclusively hosted on Youtube.
Even visiting the homepage of some sites, they'll have a Youtube "Here's what our product is"-type video that was no longer working.
Dependency hell is used in coding but it can just as easily be used for google/YouTube.
Peertube already is becoming a good floss competitor software that can be selfhosted. You make the rules, you put advertising if you want.
My reasoning for saying use newpipe with this new rule. Earlier the idea was like you are not watching ads and taking money from creators if only that was 50% of revenue. Now they are not getting nothing so why bother watching obnoxious ads.
Peertube already is becoming a good floss competitor software that can be selfhosted. You make the rules, you put advertising if you want.
My reasoning for saying use newpipe with this new rule. Earlier the idea was like you are not watching ads and taking money from creators if only that was 50% of revenue. Now they are not getting nothing so why bother watching obnoxious ads.
I wonder if this applies to “made for kids” content which traditionally has not had ads
I'm surprised they didn't do this long ago. Hosting videos is expensive.
I switched to watching youtube through firefox+adblock on android a while ago.
Ah, the smell of the boiling frogs that got YouTube where they are now.
[deleted]
Google already did that for at least a year in 3rd world countries.
What a shit change for those that don't have adblock.
This will drive people to more apps that block ads on mobile
That is the sign that world might need another youtube
If they'd just fix the googlevideo CORS errors.
This should be a nice boost for Vimeo and the rest.
It's crazy it was free for as long as it was.
Thus far, if you've got a YouTube Premium subscription… you've been able to completely avoid the ads. Completely worth the $10/mo, in my book.
Does this new policy change that?
Does this new policy change that?
Ungoogled Chromium + uBlock Origin = ZFG
Screw them. Install uBlock Origin.
this shitty move would be neutralized if you own Google stock.
What about ASMR videos?
Yet another reason to pay the danegeld to Google for ad-free experience. I hate it.
does youtube not make enough revenue already?
When I see such things two conclusions come to my mind:
1. The developers of tools like youtube-dl are the good guys, those at Google are the bad guys. There's no other way to put it. If you force all of the creators on your platform into a "partner program" that slaps ads on all of their videos, even if they don't want to, and you take all of their revenue away, knowing that creators won't leave you anyway because you're the biggest player in the market that provides them with access to the widest audience, then you're hurting both creators and consumers for your personal profit, while abusing your dominant position. On top of it, they take away the revenue generated by content created by someone else, just like a century-old music major would do, and when you put things in perspective (small YouTube channel that struggles to make a few hundred bucks per month vs. gargantuan corporation that belongs to the exclusive trillion dollar club) you realize how expectedly and banally greedy evil the former "don't be evil" company has become. And instead of listening to all the cries for changing their business model, Google is simply trying to force the world to swallow their outdated ads-based business model, proving that, after all, they're nothing more than a mediocre ads company, not a tech company that still likes to risk and innovate. In the face of so much evil piracy isn't only a right: it's a civic duty to remind those fuckers that it doesn't matter how many technological restrictions they decide to implement to force us to swallow their ads and how many repos they take down. We've also got brilliant engineers on the other side of the barricade, and we'll ALWAYS find clever ways to bypass their dumb restrictions. It's probably just not the best use of engineering resources on both sides. We'd love to spend our engineering time building things instead of reverse engineering the new authentication flow of YouTube in order to get that damn direct video URL. And Google engineers had better invest their time building a new infrastructure that offers fair payments to creators, instead of finding new ways to make people swallow their ads in spite of our scrapers.
2. Creators need to get the fuck out of YouTube. I know, it's hard because they'd lose access to a huge audience, but if nobody ever wins the initial inertia then things won't change, and the Evil Corp will keep bullying everyone. Platforms like Nebula and Curiosity Stream have proved that people are happy to pay a subscription to access premium ads-free content. And platforms like Vimeo and Twitch also offer access to a wide audience. And more platforms can be experimented too, perhaps based on micro-payments or affordable subscription models in order to both create revenue and offer creators anything more than the spare cash from ads revenue. And at some point we should consider a "video aggregator" that works pretty much like an RSS aggregator, listing videos on multiple platforms (after all, they're nothing more than URLs to mp4 files) to make sure that none of the other video platforms becomes the next YouTube. We need consumers and creators to seriously boycott YouTube and let other platforms build enough momentum. That's the only way to make an evil company that only cares about ads revenue change its mind.
1. The developers of tools like youtube-dl are the good guys, those at Google are the bad guys. There's no other way to put it. If you force all of the creators on your platform into a "partner program" that slaps ads on all of their videos, even if they don't want to, and you take all of their revenue away, knowing that creators won't leave you anyway because you're the biggest player in the market that provides them with access to the widest audience, then you're hurting both creators and consumers for your personal profit, while abusing your dominant position. On top of it, they take away the revenue generated by content created by someone else, just like a century-old music major would do, and when you put things in perspective (small YouTube channel that struggles to make a few hundred bucks per month vs. gargantuan corporation that belongs to the exclusive trillion dollar club) you realize how expectedly and banally greedy evil the former "don't be evil" company has become. And instead of listening to all the cries for changing their business model, Google is simply trying to force the world to swallow their outdated ads-based business model, proving that, after all, they're nothing more than a mediocre ads company, not a tech company that still likes to risk and innovate. In the face of so much evil piracy isn't only a right: it's a civic duty to remind those fuckers that it doesn't matter how many technological restrictions they decide to implement to force us to swallow their ads and how many repos they take down. We've also got brilliant engineers on the other side of the barricade, and we'll ALWAYS find clever ways to bypass their dumb restrictions. It's probably just not the best use of engineering resources on both sides. We'd love to spend our engineering time building things instead of reverse engineering the new authentication flow of YouTube in order to get that damn direct video URL. And Google engineers had better invest their time building a new infrastructure that offers fair payments to creators, instead of finding new ways to make people swallow their ads in spite of our scrapers.
2. Creators need to get the fuck out of YouTube. I know, it's hard because they'd lose access to a huge audience, but if nobody ever wins the initial inertia then things won't change, and the Evil Corp will keep bullying everyone. Platforms like Nebula and Curiosity Stream have proved that people are happy to pay a subscription to access premium ads-free content. And platforms like Vimeo and Twitch also offer access to a wide audience. And more platforms can be experimented too, perhaps based on micro-payments or affordable subscription models in order to both create revenue and offer creators anything more than the spare cash from ads revenue. And at some point we should consider a "video aggregator" that works pretty much like an RSS aggregator, listing videos on multiple platforms (after all, they're nothing more than URLs to mp4 files) to make sure that none of the other video platforms becomes the next YouTube. We need consumers and creators to seriously boycott YouTube and let other platforms build enough momentum. That's the only way to make an evil company that only cares about ads revenue change its mind.
Hello ad blocker my old friend
I've come to enable you again
Because an ad softly shouting
Left its seeds while I was watching
And the headache, that was planted in my brain... still remains
Within the sound of content
In restless dreams of unskippable ads I walked alone.
Narrow windows of portrait mode
Neath the halo of dark mode
I turned my brightness to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon ad
That split the night
And touched the sound, of content.
I've come to enable you again
Because an ad softly shouting
Left its seeds while I was watching
And the headache, that was planted in my brain... still remains
Within the sound of content
In restless dreams of unskippable ads I walked alone.
Narrow windows of portrait mode
Neath the halo of dark mode
I turned my brightness to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon ad
That split the night
And touched the sound, of content.
atemerev(2)
I somewhat understand Google's stance on this, as it's a service that should be allowed to make money even on people who don't want to make money. They don't really have such a way to opt out of pretty much any other service of theirs that has monetization.
But at the same time, there are people who have so heavily invested into the YouTube ecosystem with certain expectations for a very long time, and pretty much have their entire business on there, so they can't very easily take their business elsewhere if they're unhappy with the change.
This isn't a 'Netflix raising their subscription cost' scenario, where users can just cancel their subscription and sign up for a different service. It would be a massive undertaking to shift their backlog of videos onto another service, and they'd lose all their existing subscribers and have to build it up elsewhere.
So in that respect, it's kind of a shitty move by Google.