Who cares about a privately owned platform? It was never ours.
Spending time there was always going to be a waste of time. Every business wants to grow like a cancer to consume us all. The next service that you use will want the same if you use another private platform.
You should consider using something that is open source and self hosted. Peertube right? Anyone got other recommendations?
Passively?? Video streaming is anything but passive income.
Capitalists don’t care about making quality products/services.
They care about squeezing more profit out of you as time goes on.
As someone that has used ad blockers for just about as long as I have been able to, I would like to think that this is true. However, I’m not entirely sure that it is. I’ve heard that a surprising percentage of people just don’t even know that ad blockers exist. If that’s the case then they may be very well aware of what is happening. (Using made up numbers for the sake of argument since I don’t have real numbers) Like if only 5% of users use ad blockers and doubling the number of ads they show only brings that to 10% then it is certainly worth it financially. I doubt that if you were to graph that curve it would be linear - there is certainly a point where you inundate users with so many ads that even non-technical people will start learning about ad blockers. Regardless of what the real numbers are, I would be very surprised if they are making decisions this big without at least being aware of what those numbers might be. And if they can make a small amount of money indefinitely but they have evidence to suggest that they can make even more money also indefinitely then the financial motivation is obvious. Not all infinities are the same size.
My father in law uses the built in YouTube app on the TV. There were 3 ads that played. The first one was 15 minutes. The second one was also around 15 minutes. The third one was an hour. One fucking hour for a 5 minutes video.
It always makes me mad when somebody put a playlist on YouTube and out of nowhere a bad song starts playing because it’s an ad.
Objectively wrong.
YouTube could not be profitable showing one quick ad per video, especially if it’s longer content.
Im of the firm belief that youtube should make creators pay for storage of their videos.
Free teir for short videos, no monetization, YT places ads. Paid teir for longer form videos and monetization. This would ensure that long form videos should ideally be profitable for creators, or companies uploading their training videos etc pay a nominal fee for their storage.
This is the fairest way to keep youtube in the green.
Yeah it’s very clear to me the top creators make far too much money and I agree that business model bears fruit.
However, the cost of YouTube isn’t the storage, it’s serving views of the videos. That payment scheme you’ve suggested doesn’t scale well with number of views of single videos, that’s why they chose to increase income per view and not per video.
If you don’t like ads then don’t watch YouTube.
Is the sort of brain that makes a comment like this even aware that it’s missed something important? I suppose not… I mean it’s almost rabid behaviour, biting at nothing for no reason… almost like reverse virtue signalling. Come to think of it, I think Michael Jackson wrote a song about it.
I’m not here to defend the soulles multi-million dollar corporation, but we don’t actually know how much money it costs for youtube to stay up. The scale they are operating on is immense, I wouldn’t be surprised, if they were still making a loss with 10 midroll ads.
Youtubes video platform’s annual ad revenues amounted to 31.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2023.
Costs are $2.0 billion a year for hosting fees, if you were to run YouTube on AWS.
Take off creators fees and you are still in the black.
Number of ads does not necessarily scale linearly to amount of income. If the ads alienate viewers, then they become worth less. I know I personally watch less when they started sometimes subjecting me to 30 seconds of unskippable ads to watch a 90 second video. Recently, I hit “skip ad” and it took me to another ad, which made me less likely. The other day whole watching a video someone told me to watch, I paused to look at some text. After a few moments it started rolling an ad while I was trying to read the text. The more this happens, the less likely I am to watch. Wild be interesting to know statistics on viewership versus more obnoxious ad behavior, but there’s likely at least some decline in per ad avenue versus number of ads crammed in the face of viewers.
They almost certainly are running at a loss. Same as Twitch, their parent companies are generally okay with it, because they also serve as pretty solid tech demos for other services they offer (YouTube runs on Google Cloud Platform, Twitch runs on Amazon Web Services), and that pays off indirectly.
Moreover, their parent companies can use them as free advertising. Google about to launch a new phone? Guess what you’re gonna see ads for!
I think the term for this is “loss leader”
Big businesses are perfectly capable of releasing financial documents indicating what branches are making and losing money. If they don’t do so, there’s a good reason for it. Often that reason involves them doing things that are either shady or lying to the public about what’s actually happening.
We should not give them the benefit of the doubt in situations like this, because we would only be feeding their manipulation tactics.
The tears of people subsidizing my having never watched an ad (by having premium) fuels me for this week. Bring on the disagreement, but this is going to be a hard week, I’m going to listen to 2-3 hours of YouTube a day, and never have to pay attention to it to skip an ad. And my cats will listen to it ad free all day when I’m not at home.
Same with the dozen podcasts I listen regularly.
Ads never bothered me on YouTube.
They’re bothering me enough now that I’m going with an android phone after more than a decade on iPhones just so I can get back to YouTube the way it used to be with a decent ad blocker (better than it used to be actually).
I can’t fucking stand it, and again, it didn’t bother me before.
Want to show someone a short clip? Nah. Gotta skip two fucking ads first while you stand there looking stupid and waiting.
I’m fucking done.
The reason YouTube makes the ads so unbearably obnoxious is they want people to pay for premium. That’s all they’re doing is annoying people until they pay. I’ve been paying for premium since the beginning, I know it’s awful, but at least I have never seen any ads.
Until they pull a Microsoft and start throwing ads into the paid model as well.
Or like all the other streaming platforms that had add but you paid the subscription.
yeah I havent experienced it myself with YouTube, but I have heard some people say they pay for premium and they’ve started getting ads 😡 YouTube is a huge part of my life and I would be livid if this happened and I don’t know what I would do because I don’t know how I could live without YT I would love to say that I would abandon YouTube if they pulled this shit on me, but I just can’t even imagine my life without YouTube. I don’t pay for any other service, no Hulu, no Disney Plus, no HBO blah blah whatever the heck other people are paying for. when I’m craving watching something, I always go to YouTube. And I have several YouTube channels too, so YT is an integral part of my life 😭
I use Firefox with ublock origin and I don’t any ads either.
yeah I admire all of you who refuse to use the YouTube app and you watch YouTube through a browser, but in my opinion watching YouTube through a browser is clunky and tedious.
ReVanced, NewPipe, SmartTube. You’re correct that their mobile browser experience sucks.
Yeah premium makes 15 dollars per month. Ada for an average viewer makes dozens of cents per month.
youtube prem + youtube music family plan with 5 total users at $22.99 is pretty reasonable.
I remember when YouTube was only $9 a month. Something something Pepperidge Farm remembers
And I was grandfathered in at that price even after they raised their prices for everyone else, but then for some reason I got upset and I canceled YouTube but then I couldn’t live without it so I subscribed again and they put me back in at the regular price with all the new people 😡
I had the same deal, my comment is in regard to the family plan, which allocates 5 total accounts. I thought $4.60 per person a month was reasonable for the hd music alone, youtube prem was just a plus, but based on other comments I’m apparently a dipshit. 🤷
Per year?
Per month.
That’s not good at all.
Is there a blocker I can use on the android YouTube app? I put videos when I’m doing dishes, and in the last year the ads have gotten so long that if you don’t skip em or can’t (cause you’re hands are wet) they go on for 10 minutes or more. The worst are the ads that end, but don’t leave your screen until you physically press skip.
NewPipe
If you have a rooted phone and Magisk there is a module that essentially turns the stock YouTube app into the Premium version without adds and background play enabled.
Wow really? What’s it called?
Check out “ReVanced” YouTube.
It takes set up and maintenance but it is well worth the effort as you get all YouTube premium features, latest YouTube app updates, and other enhancements.
This is not their official website. Never download revanced from anywhere other than their GitHub repository or https://revanced.app
Thank you! I quickly (and carelessly) searched and pasted the link. Thank you for the correction.
Fuck YT, but bad meme. YouTube has never been profitable
I doubt that. Paper losses are not an indicator of profitability.
It’s not hard to look up the earnings
I’m a software engineer at AWS and work on video content delivery for services like Netflix. The idea that one single ad could cover the cost of delivering a video that’s been replicated in multiple servers, multiple forgets, multiple countries throughout the world is pretty hilarious. No matter how much money you think YouTube is making I can almost guarantee it’s not enough. There is a reason there is no significant competition in this space, it makes no money.
What’s less sustainable is centralized web. You must know that since you work for Amazon, right?
When PopcornTime was still a thing you could watch adfree any movie you’d like even in 4K because resources were shared through peer to peer.
Now, YouTube gets up to 12$ RPM, content creators get maybe 40% of that. With 2 prerolls and 2 midrolls + banners they get plenty enough money to make things work. Google has the most aggressive VASTs of the market. They are everywhere, called multiple times per pages.
Spare us your tears.
Besides, no significant competition? Is that a joke?
If you think it’s sustainable you can create a new service yourself, no one is stopping you. I’ve done cost estimations for projects with 1M+ customers and the margins are so tight we’ve killed at least a dozen services despite pouring months or years of effort into their designs and prototypes. It’s easy for you to complain about freebies from your couch but the reality is that if someone could make a better service than YouTube, they already would have. “Spare is your tears” lol.
Question that pertains to general hosting at those scales. In your opinion what costs more, distributing a piece of content that will get 1M views, or 1000 pieces of content that will get 1000 each? I know the math wont add up, but I dont know where the cost bottleneck is. Is hosting something even though it isnt used or that viral spike in views that kills attempts to make a smaller service like this?
no significant competition? Is that a joke?
For the type of service they are (hosting random one-off videos and series that anyone can load and optionally kicking back a portion to the content creators) - who are they competing against? If you go on the street and ask random people to name 3 streaming services that do that, you’ll likely get YouTube, “ummm”, and “I dunno”
If you ask a 40+ year old maybe…
Content creators are flying away to TikTok or Snapchat. Gamers are on Twitch and Discord etc.
My nephew is 11 yo and has never watched content on YT.
deleted by creator
Sounds like the public library system should host the peoples videos as a service, not for profit.
Unfortunately, YouTube exists because content creators make money out of the ads.
But free content video is possible with a peer to peer protocol. The content creator get the responsibility to keep the seed alive. The more popular, the more it gets shared, the more it’s available.
But content creators don’t work for free, and public libraries don’t have the resources to store all the dumb content people deem necessary to make.
Reminder: give money to Wikipedia. This thing is a miracle.
Genuine question.
How is been running for almost 20 years, most of them with very few ads?
I doubt they had been just sinking money for the kind of their hearts.
I do not know how much it cost to run a service like YouTube. Or how much money they make by ads or other ways. But they have been running for long enough to be a successful business.
And it’s just the latest few years when they are pushing these aggressive techniques.
I know that for many years in the 2000s and early 2010s- what many consider to be the golden age of Youtube- they were losing money. That’s what I think a lot or people don’t get when they claim “enshittification”- the services they are complaining about are unsustainable in their current form. That’s what it takes to establish a digital product- grow your base first while bleeding money, then figure out a way to monetize it later. As capital tightens up, the clock is running out for brands like Netflix, Discord, Youtube etc to start making money. That’s the part that sucks as a consumer but idk what else YouTube can do if it wants to be profitable. They offer a premium version for people that don’t want to watch ads.
I feel like I would need to see their accounting books to fully believe that narrative.
The lack of accounting transparency makes all a tale of “trust me I need this money to make this work”.
Yep. Hence why we need to remake the internet.
Good luck with that :thumbsup:
I refused to use adblock for years. Not because I thought Youtube needed MORE money, but because I did realize that a business ultimately only continues operating as long as the business model is sustainable. I endured, through occasional ads, ads at the bottom, then through ads every time a video was watched, then ads in the middle of videos, and even two ads before every video.
But three unskippable ads was where I drew the fucking line. Now I use adblock for Youtube and Youtube only.
That’s nice of you, but it appears that the ad-supported business model doesn’t work. It just results in enshittification and surveillance.
“We cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that it can happen is if it’s financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them.”
No one will ever pay for services like YouTube. Thus ads is the only way.
I appreciate this point of view but I refuse to have my limited time and energy wasted as a form of “payment”. Ads degrade the user experience of everything they touch and corporations don’t limit their ad use to “continue operations”, they push it as far as possible to suck as much money out of the product as they can.
The only “TV” I watch is hockey and it’s depressing watching the product get degraded year after year as they continue to shove as much advertising down our throats as possible in order to make more money. Fuck ads.
I like to watch video game speedruns. I especially enjoy the really long, challenging ones. Watching a 2 hour video on YouTube without an ad block is basically impossible at this point.
