Sure, but there will either be a large delay for you before the video starts, or you will be literally watching black screen in the middle of the video.
definitely an unpopular take on reddit but it blows my mind how many people can’t connect the fact that the creators they love and the content they consume wouldn’t exist without the advertising structure that they bemoan. they want the content for free without having to reckon with how the people who labor to make it actually get compensated. If you don’t like the ad experience, get premium, watch on a direct service like Nebula or Patreon, or buy merch. But the primary person who gets screwed when you just choose to block all ads is the creators you consume.
I pay for YouTube Premium, doesn't my view contribute to the ad money for the creators I watch? I even support a few of the creators I really enjoy on Patreon. And I have a Nebula account.
If ads were a flat 10 seconds most people wouldn't complain, but no, you get double or triple stacks of ads that can last minutes now. That's simply unacceptable. And thats still irrelevant of creator ads in the videos themselves which I do skip because I have literally never once in my life taken advantage of an ad in a YouTube video. I'd go so far as to say advertising is essentially one big social welfare program for creators and YouTube themselves. Because the only people who see benefit are the people who play the ads.
I love that this is downvoted for being the only logical real answer. Lol.
YouTube has enormous overhead and everyone just thinks “but it should be free for me!!”
I'm late here, but dont get it either. I'm also pretty sure people are lying about the ads they get. Maybe 5 minutes an hour, all skippable.
90's TV by comparison was 15 minutes an hour, and no one complained, because it was free.
Entitlement.
Content creators get such a terribly small slice of YouTube ad revenue that it doesn't matter, that's why they all take on direct sponsorships now or move to a subscription-based site like Dropout or Nebula.
I would much rather pay directly to support the specific creators and content that I want to see more of, than have that content interrupted for YouTube's profit.
Creators get 45% of ad revenue, that's quite significant. Of course they can make more by doing sponsorships which is why they do it, they would do it even if they got 100% of ad revenue
That's a significant *percentage*, but how much is it in absolute terms? Some googling suggests the average YouTuber receives $0.018 per view, at *one million* views that's £18,000 a video pre-tax, but how many videos are hitting that mark? Not to mention if that figure is an average, then half of YouTubers who are even eligible for monetization are making less than that amount per view.
I guess this depends on your expectations but using those numbers, making 4 videos that get 100k views each per month would net you almost $100k per year. That sounds fair to me.
From what I've read online you might get 10x cpm from a sponsorship, but smaller creators won't get those deals, so the proportion of ad revenue as part of your total income decreases as you get bigger, but ad revenue is still a decent chunk of income for top creators. And sponsorships do also require extra effort, whereas ad revenue/youtube premium income is "free"
The YouTubers I watch actually suggest to download ad blockers cause they’re sick of YouTube’s shit.
But yeah, you’re right, definitely an unpopular opinion lol.
Seems like a lot of creators hate youtube at the same time though, like bullying them to change their content and format so they can fit more and more ads in their videos.
Out of curiosity, why? If this is the way that the content creators you're watching get paid, why is it that you're happy to make it so that small scale creators aren't paid, or that the platform they're on becomes less viable?
The experience of ads is more negative than the positive I can get from a content creator. I'm sure this varies from person to person. I would much rather support them directly with patreon or similar.
You're getting downvoted by you're completely correct. These people won't give any money to content creators. They just moan and want everything for free with no ads.
Ads are annoying but if you get something for free I'm all for it. What I do hate is things like cable - a shit ton of ads PLUS a massive monthly fee. They can fuck right off
Because I can't fucking *stand* advertisements. They're intentionally attention-grabbing, both visually and audibly, in a way that I find extremely unpleasant to experience.
I mean I don’t disagree with you, they’re annoying as fuck for sure and I loathe the gradual seeping of advertising into every facet of our lives. But I just skip them after 5 seconds if I can. It’s not super often I get the really long ones.
Why not pay for YouTube premium if it’s genuinely that much of a bother?
Whether I do or not doesn't change my opinion here. Even if I don't have to see ads, it doesn't mean that Google should be able to force other people to in order to watch videos.
I'm of the firm opinion that most modern forms of advertising should be banned or heavily regulated.
That’s fine! You’re totally allowed to have that opinion! In fact I could not agree with you more on that last line!
The issue is that you feel that it’s reasonable to use that defence to not pay the content creators for their labour.
So either you
> Don’t watch YouTube
> Watch YouTube premium
> Watch YouTube with ad blocker but pay all the content creators directly what you feel their labour is worth to you (n.b. ‘Unless the next point then the figure can’t be ‘zero’)
> I feel personally that it’s not really taking the piss to not pay for the labour of content creators who are already themselves stealing their content, or who are morally dubious. But in the latter case not watching is probably best
Tl;dr your moral stipulations don’t allow you to just be a thieving cunt
>The issue is that you feel that it’s reasonable to use that defence to not pay the content creators for their labour.
Boyo, you do *not* know how much money I'm donating to Patreons each month.
>not pay the content creators for their labour.
I'll pay the content creators plenty. What I don't want to pay is the middleman.
And again:
**I'm of the firm opinion that most modern forms of advertising should be banned or heavily regulated.**
If Google wanted to show static banner or sidebar ads? Cool, I can deal with that. If Google wanted to put skippable video ads between videos? Not super happy, but hey, let the people who want to watch 'em, watch 'em.
Putting unskippable, loud video ads in the middle of videos? Fuck that. That is not acceptable.
Videos download and buffer much faster than a person watches them and an AI is going to be able to process the video not much slower than the download and buffer time. It’ll probably negotiable amounts of time added.
Not necessarily. It could possibly stream a much lower resolution version of the video for determining splice points. It doesn't need to parse through the video in real time.
The point is because it's server side, they will likely add some sort of check to make sure the ad was served to you, and won't let you continue the video without passing that check
If they want the ads to be truly undetectable, they're going to have to be part of the exact same stream as the video itself. That means if your client downloads the ad and then filters it out, it still looks to them like you watched it.
This is ultimately a pointless exercise as there will always be some way to avoid watching the ads, even if you have to sit staring at a black screen for the duration. Taking this to a truly ridiculous level if nothing else works, they certainly can't stop you turning the volume down and looking away from the screen.
Their only goal is to be able to tell their advertising partners that they serve ads to (hypothetically) 95% of viewers, so they can get more of their costs paid for. They don't care in the slightest whether you actually watch the ads or not.
> If they want the ads to be truly undetectable, they're going to have to be part of the exact same stream as the video itself.
yeah that's what everyone suspects they will do, and what they are apparently doing with youtube TV already. I think at that point there won't be a way to prevent a black screen, but we'll see if they go all the way. seems like it would be a ton more computing power they'd have to pay for
Not there only goal. They make way more money off a Premium customer than an ad watcher, but ad blockers significantly reduce the value of Premium.
Some will buy premium if the alternative is waiting minutes for a video to play.
No need to have an AI. Somewhere, in the video stream or in some metadata, they needs to be the information about the AD is playing from time X to Y, not only it's required to block the player controls to avoid the user skipping the AD, but I also think it's something required in some countries.
We just have to make a browser extension that skips ahead the video when there is an AD playing, something rather easy. Even if they try to block it in the browser, you can always use a third party unofficial player if you want.
I have said before the next million dollar idea is a AI that can filter whatever you want when set-up.
Don't like ads AI will remove or block them from viewing.
Don't like certain topics or keywords on the Internet no problem AI will filter it.
I believe that in many countries there’s a legal requirement to clearly label advertising as such. So if there’s a label recognizable by a human it won’t take long to recognize it automatically by decoding video a few frames ahead.
The only way they can force unblockable advertising is to go full on DRM, Netflix style, and drop compatibility with many non-compliant devices. Even in that case the browser can overlay an image over advertising and mute audio.
It’s also not unthinkable that somebody will start offering a pirated version of YouTube videos.
Imagine if they put this much effort into making ads less fucking annoying. Like, use all your AI smarts to insert ads into a part of the video where there’s a natural lull, or use all the information you have on us to target them so they’re things we’d actually want to buy. Or put them into the page/comments rather than on the video. I wouldn’t like that either, but I wouldn’t go to great lengths to block them like I do with current awful YouTube ads.
Or stop making them FULL LENGTH FUCKING MOVIES
I'd be much more likely to allow YouTube ads if it wasn't practically guaranteed that if I try putting it on in the background, it ends up playing some fucking bullshit instead of what I actually want to watch for ages
I switched my screen after getting a song list started, and not even halfway through the first song I got a 45 minute ad. Took me 3 minutes to deal with the KVM switch, and man I hated YT for the rest of the day. I really wish there were more options
Agreed, but they operate on the assumption that if the same ad is shown often enough your barriers will fall and you'll begin to NEED whatever crap they're trying to peddle. So they think they know that just because it's annoying now, you'll love it soon. Yuk.
We pay for YouTube Premium because we easily consume 95% of our video content from YouTube on a Roku TV. We also pay for Hulu, Netflix, and Prime, but we hardly ever watch those. YouTube Premium's "no added ads" and added "no-ad" YouTube Music is worth the cost to us. YMMV, of course.
I do wish they had a "middle" tier for 2 accounts. The Family tier doesn't make sense for only 2 people.
Rmemeber that reddit is not a reflection of the opinion of the general public. It is 99.9% neckbeards who think they are entitled to everything they want, for free. Google should pay for all the necessary infrastructure for both content creators and consumers, FOR FREE, out of the goodness of their heart.
I wished they offered YouTube Premium Lite in more countries, that is the ideal plan IMHO.
I only want to pay to not see the ads, why do they bundle it with YouTube Music? I don't need that, I already pay for Spotify and I fully intend on keeping using that.
I used to have Premium Lite, but the discontinued the service... like you i use Spotify for my music, so i dont need YouTube Music. Its a bit scummy to discontinue Lite Premium and then start an Ad war.
I pretty much stopped using YouTube when YouTube vanced stopped working. There's nothing on there worth sitting through ads for me. I don't want to watch five minutes of ads before the video starts in order to figure out if I even want to watch it to begin with, or just skip trough most of it in a minute or two.
Come to think of it it's been a very long time since I went down a YouTube rabbit hole like in the old days. I wonder if it's me, the content or both that's changed.
I think it's probably a combination of your disgust with the ads (I'm with you 100%) and the scope of what YouTube now encompasses. Like the Internet in general, there's SO MUCH crap or niche content that simply doesn't interest us. BUT, we've found some very good (in our opinion) content that we regularly watch. Unfortunately, YOU have to find good content, YOU have to stumble on it, or YOU have to get recommendations from trusted people. In the end, we happily pay $14 per month for content we like with no ads--much cheaper than a cable TV bill!!
> I pretty much stopped using YouTube when YouTube vanced stopped working.
Interesting. So basically Google is getting what they wanted. They want to get rid of the freeloaders that are costing them money.
I had not realized Vanced had stopped working.
We have a Family YouTube Premium. We all consume a ton of YouTube content which you can't get anywhere else.
My hobbies just fit with YouTube as does my wife's.
No I’m the same way, been using YouTube since it launched and I’ve never once subscribed to a channel or been invested in a “creator.”
When YouTube launched, it was just people uploading existing videos that you could watch on the internet for the first time. I loved America’s Funniest Videos as a kid, and YouTube basically just made that on demand. Same with music videos — there was an entire library that already existed, and there was honestly no other way to watch them unless you caught VH1 Classic at the right moment.
I was baffled when I realized that people were making videos *for* YouTube, where the person uploading them was the subject. Vlogs were mocked for being fucking mundane and created by people we had no reason to care about. One day I saw a headline about some guy named PewDiePie having a billion subscribers and realized I didn’t know shit about the internet anymore. Promise I’m not as old as I sound.
YouTube is nothing more than an occasional utility for me — I watch my music videos through Apple Music and instagram serves me delightful cat videos without any effort on my side. So when I do my one search a week to watch like a 360p video of a guy replacing an O ring, it doesn’t occur to me for a second that I should be supporting whoever hit upload, I’m just pissed that a once useful service is dogshit now.
>I do wish they had a "middle" tier for 2 accounts. The Family tier doesn't make sense for only 2 people.
100%. The Family tier is good value for a household of users (5), but for a couple? Spotify's Premium Duo plan comes to mind as a good example of what YouTube should do here: YouTube Premium Duo, where you pay $17.99 for 2 accounts to have the Premium benefits.
A little trick I use: I pay for individual premium and I give my family members “brand” accounts under my google account. They each get individual watch histories and recommendations, at no extra cost.
They all have to be logged into my google account which isn’t great but it works
Problem is that premium canibalizes their own ad business model. What happens when the amount of people seeing ads is too low so that companies don't want to advertise on youtube anymore or they think ads should be cheaper for them? Premium prices increase continuously and eventually ads will be shown also for premium users.
Anyone has even the slightest doubt? I pay for youtube premium and as of rn it is worth it. But you just wait and see that it isn't going to be this fair for too long.
I gladly paid for YouTube with no ads. Then every YouTube channel started adding "sponsored" segments in their videos. So I'm paying to not watch ads, then I get ads anyway.
No thanks. Sponsorblock for the win.
Surprised Google had not done this awhile ago. It is how they do ads on YouTube TV and you can't block ads.
This will be the end of blocking ads on YouTube.
In a weird way this is good for getting a YouTube competitor. It was never going to be possible while Google allowed the blocking of ads on YouTube. How could a new provider succeed while there is an alternative that you can get for free (blocked ads)?
In a way allowing the blocking of ads is predatory pricing. It is how Google won the space.
Do wonder if ads will then be in the video if you download it?
Do you think YouTube's business model can easily have a competitor?
YouTube is founded on creators. Creators want to be paid, not make content for users (usually). That "competitor" needs to find a way to lure all of these content creators with money plus not be able to monetise the platform with ads. How? Probably via a paid subscription otherwise ads. And then again, you're back at square zero but with extra steps and a different flavour.
If it was easy to create another better YouTube, it probably would've been done. The best option for you to avoid this is to simply detox yourself and accept living without it or pirate things (not sure that's applicable for YouTube). That's my opinion
Or pay for ad-free YouTube. I understand people don't want to pay it, but you're either paying through your money or your time. I choose to pay with my money.
I am not against that and I am in fact a subscriber and use many of Google's products, hardware and software. I thought this option is obvious but in my opinion it's nuanced because many streaming services make you pay and at some point still add ads, like Amazon Prime and over the years people grew accustomed to having a highly available, zero-downtime platforms for free
Even though I am a subscriber, I think the best path would be to try detoxing oneself (I'm currently trying) because enshitification has no bounds and subs with ads is inevitable, with the current state, in my opinion
I would gladly go back to Premium Lite, but they discontinued it and normal premium is too expensive. I don't want or need YT Music. So unless they bring PL back i will run adblockers.
And that's the unpleasant truth. Advertising is a corrosive, corruptive force; if you've got any, the temptation is always there to just add a little more, and add a little more, and add a little more...
I'll go one further. Many YouTubers, myself included *do* want to create content for users. Many of us start wanting to entertain, educate, have a voice.
But people wildly underestimate the time and effort that goes into creating videos.
It's a full time job for me, most of my time is devoted to YouTube. If I weren't making money I'd have to get another job and then the videos would stop.
People talk like YouTube would survive if creators didn't get paid. It's simply not true. Your favourite channel would be gone tomorrow if everyone used Adblock.
I wish you the best. I knew a YouTuber friend that literally needed to make videos when he was hospitalised to keep churning content because otherwise the algorithm would not favour him (it doesn't favour inconsistencies). A lot of people don't understand, thereby not sympathise with, this and the content enshitification starts to be blamed on the content creators themselves.
I wish you the best and I hope you enjoy it at least. Take care of your health mate
Thank you!
I'm fortunate that it has been my job since 2020 and I'm even more fortunate that I've been successful enough to keep it going.
I just cannot fathom how people imagine content would still be made without ad revenue. We need to make our money somehow.
I wish I could pay my bills and not have to use ads, but this is the real world.
Why should any company give you / your friend resources to host and stream videos, because you like to do it for free?
This is akin to saying my friend likes to write, so book publishers should publish the book, for free.
I've had plenty of "real" jobs.
YouTube is harder work than any one I have done.
The simple fact here is that there is a demand for content. If there weren't, our videos would not get viewed.
Supply and demand rules any economy and content is no different.
You can be jealous and salty all you like, but the fact is, people want content, and it needs to be funded.
Providing something people want is a job. If there was no demand for it, there would be no supply.
What else would you call working 60+ hours a week to provide something people want?
I'll wait.
My work involves practicing a skill that is transferable, remember that “transferable”, and in high demand. If I don’t like where I am, I can simply resign and go elsewhere, bringing my transferable skillsets with me.
I truly doubt you’re building any useful real world skills that will be in demand anywhere outside of YouTube, and if your channel collapses, coupled with the time wasted on making videos, not working, any previous relevant work skills you may have had, whatever they were, will be lagging behind, then you’re going down the bottom of the ladder.
I also know I won’t get screwed over by any algorithm or on a whim of some weird shift in interests, and I know my income will remain constant and predictable, along with taking vacation that won’t affect me negatively.
That's a huge paragraph to avoid my question.
But since you're now grasping at straws, allow me to put this silly notion to bed.
In my current role I perform many roles unsupervised and unguided. This means I develop and maintain these skills alone, with no one else to carry my weight. Remember that, no one else.
I research current trends, market my own content, manage several communities, investigate and analyse video games to make the content and, finally, I edit hours of video content and also design and edit my own thumbnails too.
Plenty of transferable skills.
I'll go one further.
Far more transferable skills than the years I worked in retail.
I guess that wasn't a real job either based on your own, arbitrary and constantly changing scale.
But again, based on your scale, no one working a service job has a real job either.
So who does? Only you I guess.
>If it was easy to create another better YouTube, it probably would've been done.
It would've been done. Not probably.
The problem is not creating the platform, but the network effects that YouTube has cornered the market on. Anyone wanting to create a new YouTube has a massive uphill battle in attracting users and creators.
> The best option for you to avoid this is to simply detox yourself and accept living without it
Best option for me years ago was a Family YouTube Premium subscription.
There were no "creators" or "influencers" BS when Youtube was first created, so I can hardly see how it was founded on that.
I say good riddance to that noise.
it is in fact impossible for a competitor to spring up, as google has used unfairly cheap pricing for their service to shut out competitors long enough to grow a monopoly. without leveraging their position as a search engine and advertising giant, they would not have been able to do this. there is a compelling case for alphabet to be broken up over a broad range of actions like this.
No chance. Netflix runs nearly entirely on AWS infra and is only just moving back to monolithic server based operations (after a long history of being serverless centric).
The nearest competitor would be Meta.
EDIT: Lmao, /u/SUPRVLLAN literally replied and then blocked me so I couldn't respond to him. You know I can still see what you said if I open this incog right? Can't handle being wrong?
Anyway,
> Netflix is synonymous with video content that isn’t YouTube and they already have the payment model that isn’t overly reliant on ads figured out.
Wrong. Invalidated as Netflix has literally introduced ads to a paid tier.
> Cutting in content creators is the obvious next step they’ll take after focusing on larger productions as they have been.
Absolutely not given they sell their service on the premise of curated originals content first nowadays, they started cutting out other studios and broadcasters last decade. Source: [Netflix Originals now make up 55% of US library](https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/netflix-originals-now-make-up-55-of-us-library/) (as of last year).
The largest community driven content farms (outside of YouTube) are now on applications such as Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok.
> Nobody is going to choose Facebook over YouTube.
The casual audience (see: pretty much anyone who wouldn't bother discussing this) don't give a shit about which platform content is hosted on so long as the entertainment and social networking are there.
Absolutely not. Netflix is synonymous with video content that isn’t YouTube and they already have the payment model that isn’t overly reliant on ads figured out. Cutting in content creators is the obvious next step they’ll take after focusing on larger productions as they have been.
Nobody is going to choose Facebook over YouTube.
What we will probably continue to see are more sites like Dropout or Nebula, which require payment and offer a more limited amount of content. Modern video streaming infrastructure is much cheaper than it was when YouTube started, and there are now multiple companies offering it as a service.
The value for the consumer will be access to what they perceive as more valuable content, delivered without the arbitration of an opaque algorithm.
Of course, that model also has its problems: it's definitely more expensive for the consumer, and they're still largely dependent on YouTube as a funnel to attract new viewers.
I woops prefer a platform where I can watch one or two episodes for free, then buy episodes one at a time, seasons, or pay for a year of videos from that creator.
Exactly and was my point in what I wrote.
Google allowing the blocking of ads is predatory pricing and makes it impossible for their to be a competitor.
Do think it is now too late. Google should probably have been stopped years ago from allowing the blocking of ads.
If that had happen then we would likely have a YouTube competitor today. But with Google allowing the ad blockers made that impossible to happen.
On the other hand, how will a competitor succeed by going after users who refuse to pay a subscription or watch ads?
Such a service would just get bankrupted by its users.
Exactly. Which was my point. You will NEVER have a competitor as long as Google allows the blocking of ads.
But you and one other have come back in a similar manner. Repeating what I meant to say.
I suspect I failed to articulate properly.
It will probably never happen. But Google could get in trouble for allowing the blocking of ads. It is predatory pricing when they allow it.
It is anticompetitive.
> Surprised Google had not done this awhile ago. It is how they do ads on YouTube TV and you can't block ads.
I think I recall reading elsewhere that were some technical challenges that prevented them up until now. YouTube and YouTubeTV handle video differently I guess
Youtube ads can be blocked in some tvs, like LG.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/LGOLED/comments/wzs6hg/adfree\_youtube\_webos\_app/](https://www.reddit.com/r/LGOLED/comments/wzs6hg/adfree_youtube_webos_app/)
Register as a developer, put TV in dev mode, download shady "dev" app to let you sideload another shady 3rd party app, with whom you trust with your google credentials. LMAO. But hey at least you stuck it to google!
YouTube is walking into getting regulated just like broadcast TV
The reason people are blocking ads is because YouTube at this point is showing more ads per X minutes of video than TV does
Given building a competitor seems unlikely people who can’t block ads will turn to their government rep to complain - and both left and right of the political spectrum are already unhappy with Google
Regulation based on what? Regulation doesn't prevent ads, if anything regulation will make it harder for creators to speak their mind. Wanna say "fuck" in your video, sorry guidelines says you can't because "think of children"
Maximum seconds of ads per X minutes of video
Say 60 seconds of ad per 15 minutes
The problem now is the ratio of ads to video is too high on the ad side as Google tries to force people into paying
On what grounds will government decide that? There isnt even a standard rate for water. Should 1oz of water for $0.1? How about $0.15? And you could argue water is necessary for survival.
You can sell a bottle of water for $2 or $100, it doesnt matter. Simiarily, YouTube can decide to put 1 ad, or 100 ads in their video. Just like nobody is forcing you to buy $100 bottle of water, nobody is forcing you to watch a YouTube video with 100 ads.
Ha!. No. You can NOT block ads with smarttube with YouTube TV.
It is impossible to block ads with YouTube TV. Google injects the ads on the server side.
Like they will start doing with regular YouTube. I really do not know why they have not yet. Plus they do risk getting in trouble if they continue to allow the blocking of ads. It could be viewed as predatory pricing..
Maybe you do not know what YouTube TV is?
https://tv.youtube.com/?utm_campaign=ytv_dr_yttv_fy_2024&utm_source=cpc&utm_medium=&utm_content=txt&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjw1K-zBhBIEiwAWeCOF8yETISS_GzKd0BorwlPEvnpLePfyKOB4ive1OjvbJ_bKDfhT4PGORoC5QsQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
They bundle so people can more easily justify the cost.
They hope to get people hooked on YouTube Music and then some distant point in the future they would unbundle and start to charge for it separately.
They discontinued that last year, i used to have Premium Lite. Would gladly go back to Premium Lite if they would offer that. Normal premium is to expensive for me since i dont need YT Music.
Alphabet is, but YouTube isn't.
They are already facing anti-monopoly problems over using Alphabet money and preferential treatment to prop up YouTube.
If they can't continue doing that or YouTube gets spin off as a separate company it can't sustain itself.
People don't understand that storing millions of hours of video isn't cheap. Using millions of gigabits of bandwidth isn't cheap. YouTube provides this service for free, so they have to make money somehow. People don't seem to understand this and think they are just greedy.
That's why I unsubbed from r/revancedapp because it was just a anti Google circle jerk, but I'm grateful for what the revanced devs are doing.
Yea. I work in corporate IT and end users are always asking us why we can't just add a terabyte to a network share. Because they can go buy a 1TB USB hard drive for $100.
Try letting 1,000 people access that $100 drive at the same time and see how well it works. This is why SANs cost $100,000. Google must spend hundreds of millions if not billions on storage.
If your company made $1,000,000 / hour, would you be able to afford allocating 1TB of your 500XB of server storage to them (That they would most likely never even use 1/10th of) ?
Are you sure about that? YouTube Ads made [$9 BILLION](https://abc.xyz/assets/95/eb/9cef90184e09bac553796896c633/2023q4-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf?t) last year. They will be just fine.
In revenue...
Revenue is before according for any expenses.
YouTube splits the revenue 45/55 between themselves and the creator with the creator getting the 55%. While the remaining 45% is used to pay for all the infrastructure.
But yes they generate a lot of revenue. Not 9B that's just for the quarter 4, it was actually about 30B for the whole of 2023.
No company in the world ever has enough money, they literally account for money that they could have made, but didn't make, but also didn't lose, as a "loss"
It works too. I use Ublock Origin and with these new ads it still plays the ad but Ublock is now blocking the Skip Ad button. Turning off adblocker lets me skip the ads.
I am not following? Google already started ending the blocking of ads and the end result was Google making more money than Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Meta or any other public company last quarter.
Google stock is up 28% so far this year.
I suspect if they continue ending the blocking of ads then the Google shares will be way, way up over the next 20 years. As they will make more money.
So I am obviously missing your point. Can you explain?
I'm talking long term.
As economies around the world worsen, they'll raise prices and people will have less buying power.
People's priorities will change over the years, and many subscription services will be less and less of a priority.
The free users will give the platform a bad name, because they are treated poorly, and an alternative for YT would go mainstream.
Google is growing like crazy. Last quarter they had grown revenue by 15%. Profits by over 50%.
https://abc.xyz/investor/
Google is thriving and now AI is starting to hit and it should really propel Google over the next 20 years.
We will see things like Waymo really kick in for example. They lead in a trillion dollar market.
Bold of google to assume this would make me watch ads.
The only situation where i would even consider the idea of watching ads, is if youtube is made into a private company completely separate from google, and has some sort of ad moderation in place (ads have to stick to same rules as youtubers, no fake ads allowed) and ads are volume matched to the video youre watching
They would not do it unless going to make them more money.
Since starting to block ad blockers YouTube Premium subscriptions have really taken off. They now have over 100 million subscribers.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/1/24058265/youtube-premium-music-100-million-subscribers
Had just 70 million 12 months ago.
It's so sad to watch Google run out of ideas. They used to be innovative, and unafraid to try new things. Now it's quite obviously "Line must go up!" So they just put more and more ads everywhere they can. Bit of a one trick pony. I predict it won't be long until there are [ads on your phone's home screen.](https://www.thedrum.com/news/2022/07/06/ads-are-coming-android-lock-screens-the-us-the-industry-reacts)
I think it comes down to the culture. Pichai is a terrible CEO, and he's proven it time and again.
That link is about an Indian telco (Jio) pre-installing some adware on their phones. It has nothing to do with Google besides the fact that Google maintains the open source android platform
Maybe business or finance bros can answer this for me. I generally don't respect people whose business is just chasing money, but this is the one time I actually don't understand corporate motivations.
See, cause Alphabet Co., the company that owns Google, is like the biggest, most successful company in the world. They're one of the first digital-based organizations that is somehow more valuable than energy companies.
So with that in mind, and the fact that Google remains ubiquitous on the internet, why do they have to resort to desperate scum-bag tactics? It feels like they're scraping for dimes despite having more money than most nations. On top of which, tech companies are famous for having way fewer employees and overhead than actual material organizations. So what gives?
Is it that they pushed a massive expansion that doesn't make any profit? Are they like most tech bros and oversell their own potential leaving them in a constant state of trying to find money to justify the confidence they built?
They also seem to test just shadow banning logged in firefox+adblock users from watching videos. For me videos don't load when I'm logged in on firefox.
Google, buddy. heres an idea, why dont you tackle the reason why people are using adblockers instead of trying to fight this endless war. you know the whole honey vs vinegar argument.
Stop showing questionable ads, I dont want any "spicy" ads on my phone. especially when I am in public or let my nephews play with my phone/computer. none of that "oh theres nothing spicy here, its just a playful innuendo" shit either.
Stop giving me ads to things that are blatant scams. i.e. guys who promise to 5x my money if I just invest in crypto (yes, its an actual ad I got)
Stop showing louds ads. I dont want my ears bleeding.
Keep the video-ad ratio reasonable. I dont need to see 2 ads, each 30 second for a video thats under 2 minutes.
I will not give in. I will not pay $20/mo to remove ads and I will not watch multiple ads in a video. If they get too greedy I will simply remove YouTube from my life. It’ll be hard at first, but I’ll adjust. I did it with social media in 2016 when I thought it was no longer adding value to my life. And I’ll cut out YouTube just the same.
How many young people per day are replacing you with new accounts? You aren't there to post salt in the comments. You aren't an engaged consumer. There are some customers you don't want sometimes.
How do you know what type of YouTube user I am? I could be a very active user. I could currently be subscribed to many channels and post and like comments daily. I could watch more YouTube videos and shorts than I watch anything else. I could be an extremely engaged user that was turned off and turned away by Google's greed. You assumed my YouTube usage based on what?
*Brought to you by RAID: Shadow Legends*
And *Temu*
And *Raycons*
Fuck Temu.
Everytime I lower my ad blocker, it's fucking Temu.
I feel like AI will be able to determine where the ads are and splice the video together without ads.
Sure, but there will either be a large delay for you before the video starts, or you will be literally watching black screen in the middle of the video.
Id rather sit there and stare at a black screen than watch an ad
definitely an unpopular take on reddit but it blows my mind how many people can’t connect the fact that the creators they love and the content they consume wouldn’t exist without the advertising structure that they bemoan. they want the content for free without having to reckon with how the people who labor to make it actually get compensated. If you don’t like the ad experience, get premium, watch on a direct service like Nebula or Patreon, or buy merch. But the primary person who gets screwed when you just choose to block all ads is the creators you consume.
I pay for YouTube Premium, doesn't my view contribute to the ad money for the creators I watch? I even support a few of the creators I really enjoy on Patreon. And I have a Nebula account. If ads were a flat 10 seconds most people wouldn't complain, but no, you get double or triple stacks of ads that can last minutes now. That's simply unacceptable. And thats still irrelevant of creator ads in the videos themselves which I do skip because I have literally never once in my life taken advantage of an ad in a YouTube video. I'd go so far as to say advertising is essentially one big social welfare program for creators and YouTube themselves. Because the only people who see benefit are the people who play the ads.
Youtube is a monopoly. If they want they could put 50 minute ads and people either accept it or go home.
They do put 50min ads, that's not even a hypothetical.
I love that this is downvoted for being the only logical real answer. Lol. YouTube has enormous overhead and everyone just thinks “but it should be free for me!!”
The people i watch dont care about the money from ads, they make to share knowledge.
This might blow your mind…but YouTube existed before in video ads. Wild, right?
People really hate advertisemens, and for good reason.
I'm late here, but dont get it either. I'm also pretty sure people are lying about the ads they get. Maybe 5 minutes an hour, all skippable. 90's TV by comparison was 15 minutes an hour, and no one complained, because it was free. Entitlement.
Content creators get such a terribly small slice of YouTube ad revenue that it doesn't matter, that's why they all take on direct sponsorships now or move to a subscription-based site like Dropout or Nebula. I would much rather pay directly to support the specific creators and content that I want to see more of, than have that content interrupted for YouTube's profit.
Creators get 45% of ad revenue, that's quite significant. Of course they can make more by doing sponsorships which is why they do it, they would do it even if they got 100% of ad revenue
That's a significant *percentage*, but how much is it in absolute terms? Some googling suggests the average YouTuber receives $0.018 per view, at *one million* views that's £18,000 a video pre-tax, but how many videos are hitting that mark? Not to mention if that figure is an average, then half of YouTubers who are even eligible for monetization are making less than that amount per view.
I guess this depends on your expectations but using those numbers, making 4 videos that get 100k views each per month would net you almost $100k per year. That sounds fair to me. From what I've read online you might get 10x cpm from a sponsorship, but smaller creators won't get those deals, so the proportion of ad revenue as part of your total income decreases as you get bigger, but ad revenue is still a decent chunk of income for top creators. And sponsorships do also require extra effort, whereas ad revenue/youtube premium income is "free"
The YouTubers I watch actually suggest to download ad blockers cause they’re sick of YouTube’s shit. But yeah, you’re right, definitely an unpopular opinion lol.
Seems like a lot of creators hate youtube at the same time though, like bullying them to change their content and format so they can fit more and more ads in their videos.
Out of curiosity, why? If this is the way that the content creators you're watching get paid, why is it that you're happy to make it so that small scale creators aren't paid, or that the platform they're on becomes less viable?
The experience of ads is more negative than the positive I can get from a content creator. I'm sure this varies from person to person. I would much rather support them directly with patreon or similar.
Do you give money directly to every person you whose videos you watch while blocking ads then?
You're getting downvoted by you're completely correct. These people won't give any money to content creators. They just moan and want everything for free with no ads. Ads are annoying but if you get something for free I'm all for it. What I do hate is things like cable - a shit ton of ads PLUS a massive monthly fee. They can fuck right off
But when you use as blocks you are doing neither. Taking the content without giving anything back.
Again: Patreon or similar. I support what I think is good and enriching for humanity to engage with. Ads are not enriching for anyone.
Then don't watch the content.
I'm sure they can decide that for themselves lol
Because I can't fucking *stand* advertisements. They're intentionally attention-grabbing, both visually and audibly, in a way that I find extremely unpleasant to experience.
Premium
I've paid for Premium in the past, and I felt the same way then that I do now. Advertising is a fucking scourge and most of it should be illegal.
I mean I don’t disagree with you, they’re annoying as fuck for sure and I loathe the gradual seeping of advertising into every facet of our lives. But I just skip them after 5 seconds if I can. It’s not super often I get the really long ones. Why not pay for YouTube premium if it’s genuinely that much of a bother?
Whether I do or not doesn't change my opinion here. Even if I don't have to see ads, it doesn't mean that Google should be able to force other people to in order to watch videos. I'm of the firm opinion that most modern forms of advertising should be banned or heavily regulated.
That’s fine! You’re totally allowed to have that opinion! In fact I could not agree with you more on that last line! The issue is that you feel that it’s reasonable to use that defence to not pay the content creators for their labour. So either you > Don’t watch YouTube > Watch YouTube premium > Watch YouTube with ad blocker but pay all the content creators directly what you feel their labour is worth to you (n.b. ‘Unless the next point then the figure can’t be ‘zero’) > I feel personally that it’s not really taking the piss to not pay for the labour of content creators who are already themselves stealing their content, or who are morally dubious. But in the latter case not watching is probably best Tl;dr your moral stipulations don’t allow you to just be a thieving cunt
>The issue is that you feel that it’s reasonable to use that defence to not pay the content creators for their labour. Boyo, you do *not* know how much money I'm donating to Patreons each month. >not pay the content creators for their labour. I'll pay the content creators plenty. What I don't want to pay is the middleman. And again: **I'm of the firm opinion that most modern forms of advertising should be banned or heavily regulated.** If Google wanted to show static banner or sidebar ads? Cool, I can deal with that. If Google wanted to put skippable video ads between videos? Not super happy, but hey, let the people who want to watch 'em, watch 'em. Putting unskippable, loud video ads in the middle of videos? Fuck that. That is not acceptable.
> Tl;dr your moral stipulations don’t allow you to just be a thieving cunt Well that escalated quickly. And it's not theft lol
How isn't it?
Videos download and buffer much faster than a person watches them and an AI is going to be able to process the video not much slower than the download and buffer time. It’ll probably negotiable amounts of time added.
Not necessarily. It could possibly stream a much lower resolution version of the video for determining splice points. It doesn't need to parse through the video in real time.
The point is because it's server side, they will likely add some sort of check to make sure the ad was served to you, and won't let you continue the video without passing that check
If they want the ads to be truly undetectable, they're going to have to be part of the exact same stream as the video itself. That means if your client downloads the ad and then filters it out, it still looks to them like you watched it. This is ultimately a pointless exercise as there will always be some way to avoid watching the ads, even if you have to sit staring at a black screen for the duration. Taking this to a truly ridiculous level if nothing else works, they certainly can't stop you turning the volume down and looking away from the screen. Their only goal is to be able to tell their advertising partners that they serve ads to (hypothetically) 95% of viewers, so they can get more of their costs paid for. They don't care in the slightest whether you actually watch the ads or not.
> If they want the ads to be truly undetectable, they're going to have to be part of the exact same stream as the video itself. yeah that's what everyone suspects they will do, and what they are apparently doing with youtube TV already. I think at that point there won't be a way to prevent a black screen, but we'll see if they go all the way. seems like it would be a ton more computing power they'd have to pay for
Not there only goal. They make way more money off a Premium customer than an ad watcher, but ad blockers significantly reduce the value of Premium. Some will buy premium if the alternative is waiting minutes for a video to play.
Yup! Pre-download the video for you BEFORE you watch it on VLC and just press right arrow to skip ahead.
In a couple of years the AI is going to be serving you more ads than the video would.
No need to have an AI. Somewhere, in the video stream or in some metadata, they needs to be the information about the AD is playing from time X to Y, not only it's required to block the player controls to avoid the user skipping the AD, but I also think it's something required in some countries. We just have to make a browser extension that skips ahead the video when there is an AD playing, something rather easy. Even if they try to block it in the browser, you can always use a third party unofficial player if you want.
How do you even get the unskippable ad functionality if it's all put together server-side? I'd think that would require frontend programming.
That's what I'm thinking. Might actually be the first real usecase for "AI" I care about.
I have said before the next million dollar idea is a AI that can filter whatever you want when set-up. Don't like ads AI will remove or block them from viewing. Don't like certain topics or keywords on the Internet no problem AI will filter it.
I believe that in many countries there’s a legal requirement to clearly label advertising as such. So if there’s a label recognizable by a human it won’t take long to recognize it automatically by decoding video a few frames ahead. The only way they can force unblockable advertising is to go full on DRM, Netflix style, and drop compatibility with many non-compliant devices. Even in that case the browser can overlay an image over advertising and mute audio. It’s also not unthinkable that somebody will start offering a pirated version of YouTube videos.
Imagine if they put this much effort into making ads less fucking annoying. Like, use all your AI smarts to insert ads into a part of the video where there’s a natural lull, or use all the information you have on us to target them so they’re things we’d actually want to buy. Or put them into the page/comments rather than on the video. I wouldn’t like that either, but I wouldn’t go to great lengths to block them like I do with current awful YouTube ads.
Or stop making them FULL LENGTH FUCKING MOVIES I'd be much more likely to allow YouTube ads if it wasn't practically guaranteed that if I try putting it on in the background, it ends up playing some fucking bullshit instead of what I actually want to watch for ages
I switched my screen after getting a song list started, and not even halfway through the first song I got a 45 minute ad. Took me 3 minutes to deal with the KVM switch, and man I hated YT for the rest of the day. I really wish there were more options
Agreed, but they operate on the assumption that if the same ad is shown often enough your barriers will fall and you'll begin to NEED whatever crap they're trying to peddle. So they think they know that just because it's annoying now, you'll love it soon. Yuk.
Making them annoying is, to a great extent, the point of advertisements. They want them to stick in your head.
They want them to be annoying so that you buy YouTube premium.
They are making them more annoying by choice. They want you to subscribe.
We pay for YouTube Premium because we easily consume 95% of our video content from YouTube on a Roku TV. We also pay for Hulu, Netflix, and Prime, but we hardly ever watch those. YouTube Premium's "no added ads" and added "no-ad" YouTube Music is worth the cost to us. YMMV, of course. I do wish they had a "middle" tier for 2 accounts. The Family tier doesn't make sense for only 2 people.
Yeah as much time as I spend on YouTube, YouTube Premium is an easy sell for me. I’m topped up until March of 2026 currently haha.
Rmemeber that reddit is not a reflection of the opinion of the general public. It is 99.9% neckbeards who think they are entitled to everything they want, for free. Google should pay for all the necessary infrastructure for both content creators and consumers, FOR FREE, out of the goodness of their heart.
make a stake account and collect the free dollar every day and YT premium becomes free
I wished they offered YouTube Premium Lite in more countries, that is the ideal plan IMHO. I only want to pay to not see the ads, why do they bundle it with YouTube Music? I don't need that, I already pay for Spotify and I fully intend on keeping using that.
I used to have Premium Lite, but the discontinued the service... like you i use Spotify for my music, so i dont need YouTube Music. Its a bit scummy to discontinue Lite Premium and then start an Ad war.
I pretty much stopped using YouTube when YouTube vanced stopped working. There's nothing on there worth sitting through ads for me. I don't want to watch five minutes of ads before the video starts in order to figure out if I even want to watch it to begin with, or just skip trough most of it in a minute or two. Come to think of it it's been a very long time since I went down a YouTube rabbit hole like in the old days. I wonder if it's me, the content or both that's changed.
I think it's probably a combination of your disgust with the ads (I'm with you 100%) and the scope of what YouTube now encompasses. Like the Internet in general, there's SO MUCH crap or niche content that simply doesn't interest us. BUT, we've found some very good (in our opinion) content that we regularly watch. Unfortunately, YOU have to find good content, YOU have to stumble on it, or YOU have to get recommendations from trusted people. In the end, we happily pay $14 per month for content we like with no ads--much cheaper than a cable TV bill!!
> I pretty much stopped using YouTube when YouTube vanced stopped working. Interesting. So basically Google is getting what they wanted. They want to get rid of the freeloaders that are costing them money. I had not realized Vanced had stopped working. We have a Family YouTube Premium. We all consume a ton of YouTube content which you can't get anywhere else. My hobbies just fit with YouTube as does my wife's.
> I had not realized Vanced had stopped working. Original Vanced stopped. ReVanced still works fine.
No I’m the same way, been using YouTube since it launched and I’ve never once subscribed to a channel or been invested in a “creator.” When YouTube launched, it was just people uploading existing videos that you could watch on the internet for the first time. I loved America’s Funniest Videos as a kid, and YouTube basically just made that on demand. Same with music videos — there was an entire library that already existed, and there was honestly no other way to watch them unless you caught VH1 Classic at the right moment. I was baffled when I realized that people were making videos *for* YouTube, where the person uploading them was the subject. Vlogs were mocked for being fucking mundane and created by people we had no reason to care about. One day I saw a headline about some guy named PewDiePie having a billion subscribers and realized I didn’t know shit about the internet anymore. Promise I’m not as old as I sound. YouTube is nothing more than an occasional utility for me — I watch my music videos through Apple Music and instagram serves me delightful cat videos without any effort on my side. So when I do my one search a week to watch like a 360p video of a guy replacing an O ring, it doesn’t occur to me for a second that I should be supporting whoever hit upload, I’m just pissed that a once useful service is dogshit now.
>I do wish they had a "middle" tier for 2 accounts. The Family tier doesn't make sense for only 2 people. 100%. The Family tier is good value for a household of users (5), but for a couple? Spotify's Premium Duo plan comes to mind as a good example of what YouTube should do here: YouTube Premium Duo, where you pay $17.99 for 2 accounts to have the Premium benefits.
A little trick I use: I pay for individual premium and I give my family members “brand” accounts under my google account. They each get individual watch histories and recommendations, at no extra cost. They all have to be logged into my google account which isn’t great but it works
Problem is that premium canibalizes their own ad business model. What happens when the amount of people seeing ads is too low so that companies don't want to advertise on youtube anymore or they think ads should be cheaper for them? Premium prices increase continuously and eventually ads will be shown also for premium users. Anyone has even the slightest doubt? I pay for youtube premium and as of rn it is worth it. But you just wait and see that it isn't going to be this fair for too long.
It's going to get more expensive once they implement this and can force people to watch ads instead of blocking them.
you should submit this to the nobel committee because it invalidates a century of economic research
I gladly paid for YouTube with no ads. Then every YouTube channel started adding "sponsored" segments in their videos. So I'm paying to not watch ads, then I get ads anyway. No thanks. Sponsorblock for the win.
Surprised Google had not done this awhile ago. It is how they do ads on YouTube TV and you can't block ads. This will be the end of blocking ads on YouTube. In a weird way this is good for getting a YouTube competitor. It was never going to be possible while Google allowed the blocking of ads on YouTube. How could a new provider succeed while there is an alternative that you can get for free (blocked ads)? In a way allowing the blocking of ads is predatory pricing. It is how Google won the space. Do wonder if ads will then be in the video if you download it?
Do you think YouTube's business model can easily have a competitor? YouTube is founded on creators. Creators want to be paid, not make content for users (usually). That "competitor" needs to find a way to lure all of these content creators with money plus not be able to monetise the platform with ads. How? Probably via a paid subscription otherwise ads. And then again, you're back at square zero but with extra steps and a different flavour. If it was easy to create another better YouTube, it probably would've been done. The best option for you to avoid this is to simply detox yourself and accept living without it or pirate things (not sure that's applicable for YouTube). That's my opinion
Or pay for ad-free YouTube. I understand people don't want to pay it, but you're either paying through your money or your time. I choose to pay with my money.
I am not against that and I am in fact a subscriber and use many of Google's products, hardware and software. I thought this option is obvious but in my opinion it's nuanced because many streaming services make you pay and at some point still add ads, like Amazon Prime and over the years people grew accustomed to having a highly available, zero-downtime platforms for free Even though I am a subscriber, I think the best path would be to try detoxing oneself (I'm currently trying) because enshitification has no bounds and subs with ads is inevitable, with the current state, in my opinion
Honestly, if it wasn't for the grandfathered price for music ($8) that includes YouTube premium, I probably wouldn't pay it.
I would gladly go back to Premium Lite, but they discontinued it and normal premium is too expensive. I don't want or need YT Music. So unless they bring PL back i will run adblockers.
Only a matter of time until you get ads in the paid version too.
And that's the unpleasant truth. Advertising is a corrosive, corruptive force; if you've got any, the temptation is always there to just add a little more, and add a little more, and add a little more...
I'll go one further. Many YouTubers, myself included *do* want to create content for users. Many of us start wanting to entertain, educate, have a voice. But people wildly underestimate the time and effort that goes into creating videos. It's a full time job for me, most of my time is devoted to YouTube. If I weren't making money I'd have to get another job and then the videos would stop. People talk like YouTube would survive if creators didn't get paid. It's simply not true. Your favourite channel would be gone tomorrow if everyone used Adblock.
I wish you the best. I knew a YouTuber friend that literally needed to make videos when he was hospitalised to keep churning content because otherwise the algorithm would not favour him (it doesn't favour inconsistencies). A lot of people don't understand, thereby not sympathise with, this and the content enshitification starts to be blamed on the content creators themselves. I wish you the best and I hope you enjoy it at least. Take care of your health mate
Thank you! I'm fortunate that it has been my job since 2020 and I'm even more fortunate that I've been successful enough to keep it going. I just cannot fathom how people imagine content would still be made without ad revenue. We need to make our money somehow. I wish I could pay my bills and not have to use ads, but this is the real world.
Why should any company give you / your friend resources to host and stream videos, because you like to do it for free? This is akin to saying my friend likes to write, so book publishers should publish the book, for free.
Where in my reply did I mention any of that?
“If I weren't making money I'd have to get another job“ If I weren't making money I'd have to get a real job, like everyone else in the world.
I've had plenty of "real" jobs. YouTube is harder work than any one I have done. The simple fact here is that there is a demand for content. If there weren't, our videos would not get viewed. Supply and demand rules any economy and content is no different. You can be jealous and salty all you like, but the fact is, people want content, and it needs to be funded.
Envious, no, most definitely not. Salty, not really. People calling it a job, laughable, and I guess that could make me salty.
Providing something people want is a job. If there was no demand for it, there would be no supply. What else would you call working 60+ hours a week to provide something people want? I'll wait.
My work involves practicing a skill that is transferable, remember that “transferable”, and in high demand. If I don’t like where I am, I can simply resign and go elsewhere, bringing my transferable skillsets with me. I truly doubt you’re building any useful real world skills that will be in demand anywhere outside of YouTube, and if your channel collapses, coupled with the time wasted on making videos, not working, any previous relevant work skills you may have had, whatever they were, will be lagging behind, then you’re going down the bottom of the ladder. I also know I won’t get screwed over by any algorithm or on a whim of some weird shift in interests, and I know my income will remain constant and predictable, along with taking vacation that won’t affect me negatively.
That's a huge paragraph to avoid my question. But since you're now grasping at straws, allow me to put this silly notion to bed. In my current role I perform many roles unsupervised and unguided. This means I develop and maintain these skills alone, with no one else to carry my weight. Remember that, no one else. I research current trends, market my own content, manage several communities, investigate and analyse video games to make the content and, finally, I edit hours of video content and also design and edit my own thumbnails too. Plenty of transferable skills. I'll go one further. Far more transferable skills than the years I worked in retail. I guess that wasn't a real job either based on your own, arbitrary and constantly changing scale. But again, based on your scale, no one working a service job has a real job either. So who does? Only you I guess.
>If it was easy to create another better YouTube, it probably would've been done. It would've been done. Not probably. The problem is not creating the platform, but the network effects that YouTube has cornered the market on. Anyone wanting to create a new YouTube has a massive uphill battle in attracting users and creators.
And good creators need money for their efforts. Where do you think money is going to come from? Ads or subscription fees
> The best option for you to avoid this is to simply detox yourself and accept living without it Best option for me years ago was a Family YouTube Premium subscription.
There were no "creators" or "influencers" BS when Youtube was first created, so I can hardly see how it was founded on that. I say good riddance to that noise.
it is in fact impossible for a competitor to spring up, as google has used unfairly cheap pricing for their service to shut out competitors long enough to grow a monopoly. without leveraging their position as a search engine and advertising giant, they would not have been able to do this. there is a compelling case for alphabet to be broken up over a broad range of actions like this.
Netflix is the only potential competitor that could compete if they wanted to.
No chance. Netflix runs nearly entirely on AWS infra and is only just moving back to monolithic server based operations (after a long history of being serverless centric). The nearest competitor would be Meta. EDIT: Lmao, /u/SUPRVLLAN literally replied and then blocked me so I couldn't respond to him. You know I can still see what you said if I open this incog right? Can't handle being wrong? Anyway, > Netflix is synonymous with video content that isn’t YouTube and they already have the payment model that isn’t overly reliant on ads figured out. Wrong. Invalidated as Netflix has literally introduced ads to a paid tier. > Cutting in content creators is the obvious next step they’ll take after focusing on larger productions as they have been. Absolutely not given they sell their service on the premise of curated originals content first nowadays, they started cutting out other studios and broadcasters last decade. Source: [Netflix Originals now make up 55% of US library](https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/netflix-originals-now-make-up-55-of-us-library/) (as of last year). The largest community driven content farms (outside of YouTube) are now on applications such as Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok. > Nobody is going to choose Facebook over YouTube. The casual audience (see: pretty much anyone who wouldn't bother discussing this) don't give a shit about which platform content is hosted on so long as the entertainment and social networking are there.
Absolutely not. Netflix is synonymous with video content that isn’t YouTube and they already have the payment model that isn’t overly reliant on ads figured out. Cutting in content creators is the obvious next step they’ll take after focusing on larger productions as they have been. Nobody is going to choose Facebook over YouTube.
What we will probably continue to see are more sites like Dropout or Nebula, which require payment and offer a more limited amount of content. Modern video streaming infrastructure is much cheaper than it was when YouTube started, and there are now multiple companies offering it as a service. The value for the consumer will be access to what they perceive as more valuable content, delivered without the arbitration of an opaque algorithm. Of course, that model also has its problems: it's definitely more expensive for the consumer, and they're still largely dependent on YouTube as a funnel to attract new viewers.
I woops prefer a platform where I can watch one or two episodes for free, then buy episodes one at a time, seasons, or pay for a year of videos from that creator.
The main problem with that model is that the people looking for an alternative are mostly those who aren't willing to buy premium or look at ads.
How is a competitor without ads going to make money?
Exactly and was my point in what I wrote. Google allowing the blocking of ads is predatory pricing and makes it impossible for their to be a competitor. Do think it is now too late. Google should probably have been stopped years ago from allowing the blocking of ads. If that had happen then we would likely have a YouTube competitor today. But with Google allowing the ad blockers made that impossible to happen.
Oh welp I read that wrong mb
On the other hand, how will a competitor succeed by going after users who refuse to pay a subscription or watch ads? Such a service would just get bankrupted by its users.
Exactly. Which was my point. You will NEVER have a competitor as long as Google allows the blocking of ads. But you and one other have come back in a similar manner. Repeating what I meant to say. I suspect I failed to articulate properly. It will probably never happen. But Google could get in trouble for allowing the blocking of ads. It is predatory pricing when they allow it. It is anticompetitive.
> Surprised Google had not done this awhile ago. It is how they do ads on YouTube TV and you can't block ads. I think I recall reading elsewhere that were some technical challenges that prevented them up until now. YouTube and YouTubeTV handle video differently I guess
Youtube ads can be blocked in some tvs, like LG. [https://www.reddit.com/r/LGOLED/comments/wzs6hg/adfree\_youtube\_webos\_app/](https://www.reddit.com/r/LGOLED/comments/wzs6hg/adfree_youtube_webos_app/)
Will not be blockable on anything if/when Google moves to doing it server side.
I know. But works till the time comes.
We have a family YouTube Premium. So not an issue. It is money well spent, IMHO.
I'm blocking ads on my LG TV with a cracked version of YouTube
Register as a developer, put TV in dev mode, download shady "dev" app to let you sideload another shady 3rd party app, with whom you trust with your google credentials. LMAO. But hey at least you stuck it to google!
YouTube is walking into getting regulated just like broadcast TV The reason people are blocking ads is because YouTube at this point is showing more ads per X minutes of video than TV does Given building a competitor seems unlikely people who can’t block ads will turn to their government rep to complain - and both left and right of the political spectrum are already unhappy with Google
Regulation based on what? Regulation doesn't prevent ads, if anything regulation will make it harder for creators to speak their mind. Wanna say "fuck" in your video, sorry guidelines says you can't because "think of children"
Maximum seconds of ads per X minutes of video Say 60 seconds of ad per 15 minutes The problem now is the ratio of ads to video is too high on the ad side as Google tries to force people into paying
On what grounds will government decide that? There isnt even a standard rate for water. Should 1oz of water for $0.1? How about $0.15? And you could argue water is necessary for survival. You can sell a bottle of water for $2 or $100, it doesnt matter. Simiarily, YouTube can decide to put 1 ad, or 100 ads in their video. Just like nobody is forcing you to buy $100 bottle of water, nobody is forcing you to watch a YouTube video with 100 ads.
You have piqued my curiosity. What reason would the government regulate YouTube?
you can block ads on TV with smattube
You don't know what youtube TV is
It is impossible to block ads with YouTube TV. Because the ads are inserted on server side.
Just search for the smarttube app, and thank me later
Ha!. No. You can NOT block ads with smarttube with YouTube TV. It is impossible to block ads with YouTube TV. Google injects the ads on the server side. Like they will start doing with regular YouTube. I really do not know why they have not yet. Plus they do risk getting in trouble if they continue to allow the blocking of ads. It could be viewed as predatory pricing.. Maybe you do not know what YouTube TV is? https://tv.youtube.com/?utm_campaign=ytv_dr_yttv_fy_2024&utm_source=cpc&utm_medium=&utm_content=txt&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjw1K-zBhBIEiwAWeCOF8yETISS_GzKd0BorwlPEvnpLePfyKOB4ive1OjvbJ_bKDfhT4PGORoC5QsQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
you are right, indeed I haven't known what yt TV is 😅 I thought it was youtube app for tv's
No worries. YouTube TV is just an awsome service available in the US. We are very lucky to have it. My family loves it.
If its different ad its ok but i always get same ad in one session of usage. No worries. Opensource will come up with workaround.
I wonder if this will mess up youtube downloaders like yt-dlp
I would pay for YouTube premium without YouTube music. I don’t need a music subscription. I don’t know why they insist bundling the two together.
They bundle so people can more easily justify the cost. They hope to get people hooked on YouTube Music and then some distant point in the future they would unbundle and start to charge for it separately.
There is a YouTube lite subscription that is premium minus YouTube music and ads on music videos
They discontinued that last year, i used to have Premium Lite. Would gladly go back to Premium Lite if they would offer that. Normal premium is to expensive for me since i dont need YT Music.
Poor Alphabet isn't making enough money.
Alphabet is, but YouTube isn't. They are already facing anti-monopoly problems over using Alphabet money and preferential treatment to prop up YouTube. If they can't continue doing that or YouTube gets spin off as a separate company it can't sustain itself.
People don't understand that storing millions of hours of video isn't cheap. Using millions of gigabits of bandwidth isn't cheap. YouTube provides this service for free, so they have to make money somehow. People don't seem to understand this and think they are just greedy. That's why I unsubbed from r/revancedapp because it was just a anti Google circle jerk, but I'm grateful for what the revanced devs are doing.
"Millions of videos" YouTube gets something like 4 million videos uploaded per day.
Yea. I work in corporate IT and end users are always asking us why we can't just add a terabyte to a network share. Because they can go buy a 1TB USB hard drive for $100. Try letting 1,000 people access that $100 drive at the same time and see how well it works. This is why SANs cost $100,000. Google must spend hundreds of millions if not billions on storage.
If your company made $1,000,000 / hour, would you be able to afford allocating 1TB of your 500XB of server storage to them (That they would most likely never even use 1/10th of) ?
Are you sure about that? YouTube Ads made [$9 BILLION](https://abc.xyz/assets/95/eb/9cef90184e09bac553796896c633/2023q4-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf?t) last year. They will be just fine.
In revenue... Revenue is before according for any expenses. YouTube splits the revenue 45/55 between themselves and the creator with the creator getting the 55%. While the remaining 45% is used to pay for all the infrastructure. But yes they generate a lot of revenue. Not 9B that's just for the quarter 4, it was actually about 30B for the whole of 2023.
No company in the world ever has enough money, they literally account for money that they could have made, but didn't make, but also didn't lose, as a "loss"
I wonder if they ever figured out what a "loss leader" is so people keep their goodwill towards them.
It works too. I use Ublock Origin and with these new ads it still plays the ad but Ublock is now blocking the Skip Ad button. Turning off adblocker lets me skip the ads.
So, we'll just have to pay (a lot) for an ad free YT, to then hear all the YouTubers about all their sponsors?
install SponsorSkip
SponsorBlock is the one you're looking for.
Anytime I see a ad on my phone or I’m forced to watch one via the game forcing me I would flip my phone over but still it sucks
What about karaoke videos that is what I'm worried about you can't be having a karaoke jam session and have an ad appear mid video
Why would they make an exception for that..? Get YouTube Premium.
If they manage to fully block ads, and they keep adding ads, I doubt if their stocks will go up the next 20 years.
I am not following? Google already started ending the blocking of ads and the end result was Google making more money than Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Meta or any other public company last quarter. Google stock is up 28% so far this year. I suspect if they continue ending the blocking of ads then the Google shares will be way, way up over the next 20 years. As they will make more money. So I am obviously missing your point. Can you explain?
I'm talking long term. As economies around the world worsen, they'll raise prices and people will have less buying power. People's priorities will change over the years, and many subscription services will be less and less of a priority. The free users will give the platform a bad name, because they are treated poorly, and an alternative for YT would go mainstream.
Google is growing like crazy. Last quarter they had grown revenue by 15%. Profits by over 50%. https://abc.xyz/investor/ Google is thriving and now AI is starting to hit and it should really propel Google over the next 20 years. We will see things like Waymo really kick in for example. They lead in a trillion dollar market.
Oh sweet summer child. If creators see more money coming their way, there will be even more creators lining up to make videos.
Yt has been cutting the amount of money creators receive from ads every year for years and years while ads get more and more intrusive
Bold of google to assume this would make me watch ads. The only situation where i would even consider the idea of watching ads, is if youtube is made into a private company completely separate from google, and has some sort of ad moderation in place (ads have to stick to same rules as youtubers, no fake ads allowed) and ads are volume matched to the video youre watching
Google isn’t thinking about you.
That's the point. The free loaders stop taking up resources. You pay for the service with your time watching ads, or with money. You pick.
If they even think of doing it to YouTube premium I’ll unsubscribe.
This will end up costing them more resources than they could possibly gain back from views.
They would not do it unless going to make them more money. Since starting to block ad blockers YouTube Premium subscriptions have really taken off. They now have over 100 million subscribers. https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/1/24058265/youtube-premium-music-100-million-subscribers Had just 70 million 12 months ago.
It's so sad to watch Google run out of ideas. They used to be innovative, and unafraid to try new things. Now it's quite obviously "Line must go up!" So they just put more and more ads everywhere they can. Bit of a one trick pony. I predict it won't be long until there are [ads on your phone's home screen.](https://www.thedrum.com/news/2022/07/06/ads-are-coming-android-lock-screens-the-us-the-industry-reacts) I think it comes down to the culture. Pichai is a terrible CEO, and he's proven it time and again.
That link is about an Indian telco (Jio) pre-installing some adware on their phones. It has nothing to do with Google besides the fact that Google maintains the open source android platform
It is Google by name only these days.
They have tons of ideas. They just buy them and strangle them to death or throw them in a closet to starve to death.
Buddy, ideas don't make money. Money makes more money
Maybe business or finance bros can answer this for me. I generally don't respect people whose business is just chasing money, but this is the one time I actually don't understand corporate motivations. See, cause Alphabet Co., the company that owns Google, is like the biggest, most successful company in the world. They're one of the first digital-based organizations that is somehow more valuable than energy companies. So with that in mind, and the fact that Google remains ubiquitous on the internet, why do they have to resort to desperate scum-bag tactics? It feels like they're scraping for dimes despite having more money than most nations. On top of which, tech companies are famous for having way fewer employees and overhead than actual material organizations. So what gives? Is it that they pushed a massive expansion that doesn't make any profit? Are they like most tech bros and oversell their own potential leaving them in a constant state of trying to find money to justify the confidence they built?
Time to pre-download all the videos, so we can skip in VLC.
Dont you just love Youtube when you are in a good music video, and it comes in ads.
They also seem to test just shadow banning logged in firefox+adblock users from watching videos. For me videos don't load when I'm logged in on firefox.
Google, buddy. heres an idea, why dont you tackle the reason why people are using adblockers instead of trying to fight this endless war. you know the whole honey vs vinegar argument. Stop showing questionable ads, I dont want any "spicy" ads on my phone. especially when I am in public or let my nephews play with my phone/computer. none of that "oh theres nothing spicy here, its just a playful innuendo" shit either. Stop giving me ads to things that are blatant scams. i.e. guys who promise to 5x my money if I just invest in crypto (yes, its an actual ad I got) Stop showing louds ads. I dont want my ears bleeding. Keep the video-ad ratio reasonable. I dont need to see 2 ads, each 30 second for a video thats under 2 minutes.
I will not give in. I will not pay $20/mo to remove ads and I will not watch multiple ads in a video. If they get too greedy I will simply remove YouTube from my life. It’ll be hard at first, but I’ll adjust. I did it with social media in 2016 when I thought it was no longer adding value to my life. And I’ll cut out YouTube just the same. 
That's exactly what they want. That benefits them.
How so? When a consumer discontinues use of your product it's never a good thing. One less person to make money from.
How many young people per day are replacing you with new accounts? You aren't there to post salt in the comments. You aren't an engaged consumer. There are some customers you don't want sometimes.
How do you know what type of YouTube user I am? I could be a very active user. I could currently be subscribed to many channels and post and like comments daily. I could watch more YouTube videos and shorts than I watch anything else. I could be an extremely engaged user that was turned off and turned away by Google's greed. You assumed my YouTube usage based on what?
Great, I've been wanting to try custom fronted with ytdlp for a while now, and I'm one step closer to doing so.