Youtube let the other shoe drop in their end-stage enshittification this week. Last month, they required you to turn on Youtube History to view the feed of youtube videos recommendations. That seems reasonable, so I did it. But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don't get much from my choices. It still did a pretty good job of showing me stuff I was interested in watching.
Then on Oct 1, they threw up a "You're using an Ad Blocker" overlay on videos. I'd use my trusty Overlay Remover plugin to remove the annoying javascript graphic and watch what I wanted. I didn't have to click the X to dismiss the obnoxious page.
Last week, they started placing a timer with the X so you had to wait 5 seconds for the X to appear so you could dismiss blocking graphic.
Today, there was a new graphic. It allowed you to view three videos before you had to turn off your Ad Blocker. I viewed a video 3 times just to see what happens.
Now all I see is this.
Google has out and out made it a violation of their ToS to have an ad blocker to view Youtube. Or you can pay them $$$.
I ban such sites from my systems by replacing their DNS name in my hosts file routed to 127.0.0.1 which means I can't view the site. I have quite a few banned sites now.
I hate ads as much as anyone and have been blocking them for almost as long as ad blockers have existed. I still acknowledge the fact that ads are the primary revenue source for a lot of things on the Internet, and I selectively enable them for content I want to pay for.
How do you think Youtube is supposed to survive without ads or subscriptions? When they puts ads on their site, the unsaid agreement is that you exchange your ad views for their service.
Yeah, I feel real bad for them. Google made $13.9B last quarter. Perhaps if the greed wasn't absolutely bottomless I'd be willing to pay a small fee. But wait, aren't they selling all my private information? I thought that's how it works. If you don't pay for a product, you are the product. No?
A lot of creators are already beginning to work based off donations (AKA patron and other sites). Thats one model that could work. Kinda like lemmy.world.
Youtube ads don't just pay creators though, they also pay for video hosting, discovery, and streaming, which aren't cheap. A lemmy for video streaming would be great, but there's a reason it hasn't really happened yet, you'd need a much larger portion of viewers to pay than what it takes lemmy to run, and you'd need a bigger community of developers to build it, which is why most youtube alternatives are strictly paid products. None of that is criticism of the idea, I think it would be great if we could wrench away some of youtube's monopoly, but at the same time we need to understand why it's a challenging concept
Ask and you shall receive: https://joinpeertube.org/
There are even companies springing up who will run and host it for you, for a price, of course.
Coincidentally, the price of advertisements
Well, not necessarily, right? It could be funded any number of ways, but on YT you're locked in to either watching their ads, or paying their premium.
Those are exactly the number of ways.
Yeah I'm trying to figure that out, too. Other than different tiers, what other payment model is there that would make sense?
Is it though? How much revenue does Google get from bombarding me with ads? I despise ads, block them whenever I can and will actively avoid products that interrupt my shows.
Instead they could get 5$ a month from me for no ads.
Yet here we are, they sending ads my way and me fighting them off with every tool possible.
With all the tracking they do, you'd think they'd be able to identify power users like me, I run piholes, blockers, vanced etc, yet they still don't seem to understand I'm not the target audience they are looking for....
They do this already. It's called YouTube Premium and they've determined it's worth more than $5 a month. My guess is the amount they decide to charge is not an arbitrary number, but one that covers their expenses based on expected engagement.
Unpopular opinion: If people either paid monthly, or they didn't run pihole, blockers, or vanced, the monthly price of YT Premium would probably be closer to your magical $5 cost. Although, honestly, I doubt you'd pay the $5 either.
"the mega globo corps only charge what they have to, to make ends meet. it would be cheaper if every one paid i swear"
I mean, we are where we're at. So, unless you can prove otherwise...
100% agree.
Donations are not ads.
Checked that out, typed in Board Game Reviews, only videos are clickbait videos by sleazebag Jon Del Arroz, Noped out so fast
Well yes, this is the problem isn't it:
Those YouTubers have the option to disable ads on their channel if that is truly all the revenue they need, you don't need to make that decision for them
I thought creators cant disable ads now?
I think they still can but they have less fine control over which ad placements they disable? I'm not totally sure, but that's what this link seems to imply https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6332943?hl=en
I don't have much but my few videos I have no longer have the option to disable ads.
Your talking about YouTube as though they're some fledgling startup
Are you even the tiniest bit aware of the economics of an on-demand video platform with 4K 60fps capabilities? Lol.
How much net profit did alphabet bring in pay year?
They had a system in place that put more ads on users depending on how many used an ad blocker. When the users got used to it, YouTube realized they could push it on everyone and make more money. They'd survive as a business even if that wasn't the case anyway, Google owns them.
The problem isn't ads, it's how obnoxious they've gotten with ads. Full length ads without even a skip button, ads in the beginning, ads in the middle. Have you tried using Google without blockers or news websites? It's obnoxious how ads are just fucking everywhere. These companies aren't hurting for money, they're still making a massive amount of profit. They just want even more profit next year. Not to mention you even have people here actually using Youtube Premium who are still seeing ads under the videos. Zero sympathy.
Start charging people who monetized their videos, like any other web host. They can run youtube ads, or pay money. Subsidize the free users.
Subsidize lmao. Entitled brats do not have the right to say anything.
What are you trying to say? Who is an entitled brat? This comment makes no sense.
It is clear. Reading comprehension.
Nope not clear at all.
i dont care really.
How many years have we heard the BS about how they're gathering all this info so they can do 'targeted advertising'? HAH. 1. Ads suck. 2. Dear advertisers: you are being conned: it doesn't work. Do you REALLY think anyone is actually WATCHING those advertisements? WHY?
Yeah, ads don't work. That's why it's such a large industry where everyone and their mother throws money at it. Lol - get a grip on reality.
Advertising is largely a cargo cult, with the "advertising/marketing is the most important thing" mindset being pushed by people with a vested interest in getting you to spend money on advertising. Actual, real businesses buying actual, real advertisements have said they saw basically no difference in revenue before and after buying the ad.
Don't get me wrong, it's not like there's no point in advertising--small businesses need it to jumpstart their client base, and medium/large businesses use it to make sure their products maintain mindshare so that a customer is more likely to think "I want a Coke" instead of "I want a soda." But in terms of directly influencing customer purchasing decisions, the biggest influence is old-fashioned word of mouth and direct customer experience, not advertising.
Recall that YouTube is Google. Since they are scraping massive amounts of data about users from browser and phone apps, I feel like they should be paying me, really. Google profits off of the content we create for them, and then profits off of tracking us both online and offline, and then they have the gall to charge us money for it and show us ever more obnoxious advertisements. They've trained their AI products off of every gmail ever written and every Google Voice call every made, every YouTube video ever uploaded, and I absolutely refuse to feel any sympathy for them trying to bleed more money from the public.
🤡
Youtube is already profitable, you're just making them more profit.
Youtube is already profitable. This move is an attempt to make more profit. It's called "maximizing profit."
Profit, by definition, is what's leftover after all business expenses have been paid.