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.
Just like a few of the other posts, I honestly don’t get it. If they can’t sell your data and can’t serve you ads, then why would they want to spend money serving you for free? There’s so many people complaining how YouTube has a monopoly and how it’s not even that hard to run, but I seriously doubt these people. Transcoding video and distributing it worldwide while having automated moderation is not easy or cheap. If there were serious contenders in the space people would have moved on, and I don’t think it’s just the network effect that keeps YouTube as a dominant player here.
People despise ads, but then they want content for free. They use adblockers to bypass a primary revenue source for a website, then go all surprised Pikachu face when that website doesn’t welcome them. And then they get upset that they don’t want to be the product despite not willing to be a source of ad revenue. I’m willing to pay for YouTube premium (and other subscription models to get rid of ads), but a lot of people aren’t. And honestly, I really would rather those people simply leave the site. It would lower operating costs for YouTube (I don’t expect my subscription fees to go down but maybe their engineers will have more free time to work on features besides adblocker-blocking), and more people on different sites would lead to more competition.
If you aren’t willing to eat ads, and you aren’t willing to be the product, and you aren’t willing to pay a subscription, then why do you think you’re entitled to content?
They shouldn’t. If they can’t figure out how to make money with it they should close it down. If they insist on thinking about it as a product and it doesn’t make money, it’s a product that doesn’t make sense and should not exist. If the only way you can make people use your product is by giving it away, what does that tell you about it?
They could lock down the platform behind paywall but they don’t want to do that. They want to have their cake and eat it too. They want all the free videos being uploaded but they don’t like all the free viewers. Unfortunately they go hand in hand.
You have it perfectly backwards: YouTube wants content for free, and to not have to share any but the most pitiful fractions of ad income with the ACTUAL content creators.
YouTube does not produce content, others do. YouTube has gone out of its way to dick the vast majority of them, especially the smaller ones, to the point that as such, unless you have a Patreon, a website or store of your own, corporate sponsors, merch, or some other side hustle in addition to making YouTube content, you’re literally making content for a fraction of a penny per view, and entirely at your own cost.
And even then, you’re subject to an algorithm over which you have no control and which can just as fickly ban your content to oblivion as it can raise your content to the multi-million views club. By skipping YouTube ads and finding other ways to support the content creators I enjoy, I help give my creators a financial buffer from the unpredictable vagaries of the algorithm and also withhold reward from YouTube as well.
When YouTube shared ad revenue with content creators in a much more equal fashion, I did not have a problem with their ads. But several years ago – I want to say six or seven, but it’s been going on for at least ten – YouTube got greedy with the ads AND with becoming incredibly unstable and unreliable for creators in all manner of ways AND decreasing payouts to creators all along the way, at which point it became clear that me watching an ad or not no longer affects the content creators I enjoy at all. And they are the only reason I am on YouTube to begin with.
(And don’t get me started on all the copyright/demonetization scams there are on YouTube now: I have a friend who got a copyright strike for playing a C scale on a piano because some asshole claimed it and YouTube lets them do it: even when a creator gets views, they can get demonetized at a drop of a hat even for obviously ridiculous claims, and then that revenue goes to the person making the copyright claim. Win/win for everyone except the person who actually made the content.)
Over the years, YouTube has never failed to excel at two things: server space, and fucking its golden geese, the creators of the actual content, without which no one would be making any money there at all. So get back to us when YouTube recognizes the creators of the gold mine they have in the content hosted there, and once again finds a way to respect for the amount of time and effort and cost that goes into creating that content by sharing revenue with content creators in a more equitable manner.
TL;DR: Why should I watch ANY YouTube ads at all when I can support content creators via Patreon or a creator’s website and know that a much more equitable amount of that revenue will go straight to the creator of that content, where it belongs?
YouTube still pays creators pretty high comparatively (55% of ad revenue according to https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-influencers-get-paid-on-instagram-tiktok-youtube). You are simply getting a service (hosted, searchable, collection of the largest collection of web videos in an extremely nice interface) that costs money even outside of the creator’s cost. For creators they are allowing that 45% cut of ad revenue to get access to the YouTube audience, paid hosting that simply works, nice creator tools, etc.
You can state that it’s a valueless thing that anyone could replicate, but the evidence is that there aren’t many alternatives that do better. Today we do have things like PeerTube (which I think all creators should consider selfhosting with ads/subscriptions and federating the free stuff after a delay) and joining creator owned video services like Nebula (which could be made even better with federation). Unfortunately, with both you run into the discoverability problem, something creators and their audiences are paying to solve when you are hosting on YouTube.
I’d take your argument further back on the sourcing of getting content to you - why should you pay for internet service when it’s the content of the videos you watch not the wires that deliver it that have value? If you hacked around your neighbors WIFI to get some free network access, you could zero-cost get something you might not necessarily want to budget for, and you get quite a nice service out of it. Why shouldn’t that be okay when you still Patreon the creators of your videos given your reasoning about YouTube providing no value?
Yeah, except I didn’t say that, nor any of the other strawmen you erected to slam down.
What asinine aggrandizements and distortions. “Why should you pay for internet service” lol. (Reading your response I am momentarily rethinking it, certainly.)
Get back to me when you can address what I actually wrote, and not what you need me to have written. Thanks.
I totally agree. I am a Youtube Premium user for this exact reason. No ads means less financial incentive to track me (I remember a statistic where one user was worth 4cents per year, could be wrong about the exact number though). In a perfect world we would habe monetization networks instead of ad networks, on a pay per view or subscription model instead of ads. This would not only make the companies more money, but also reduce the incentive for them to track you (I would even claim that unnecessary tracking would hurt their business).
We can either have a free (as in no costs) or a free (as in liberty) internet, not both
They are still tracking you though. Removing ads is a reason to pay for YouTube premium, but it’s not to get less tracking. Less tracking is not the selling point or service offered by YouTube premium.
That’s because they still have a financial incentive to do so: Google doesn’t offer a fully paid version of their service
They’re definitely still tracking their premium users, I agree. But my counterpoint is, what business, online or not, doesn’t track me? If I go out and buy something at a retail store I’m gonna bet my ass I’m being tracked. If I don’t want to be tracked, then I should be making sure information I consider to be sensitive is not being exposed. If there is no reasonable expectation to privacy in the public, then I think it’s fit that there’s no reasonable expectation to privacy when I’m surfing the internet.
Read the comment I responded to. They said YouTube premium provides them with less incentive to track them. I’m informing them that is not the benefit of paying for YouTube premium. Too many people mistakenly believe paying means they stop being the product.
In a sense I agree with that piekay though. If they can’t serve me targeted ads on YouTube they lose that money trying to develop technology to track me in that regard. How much money that is I guess is hard to say, since the tracking on YouTube certainly can carry over to other parts of Alphabet.
I’m not sure how having a paid account is supposed to lead to less tracking when the algorithm meant to push viewers into a viewing loop is made possible by tracking. Accounts with more information make for more useful demographic data.
Not having ads is a benefit of YouTube premium, but less tracking is not a benefit when there is a reason to track even without ads. For better products and surveillance. There is less reasons to not track.