As a content consumer I see this as a positive thing for me.
A few months ago when YouTube decided to auto-add ads on all videos, my watch time on YouTube decreased by more than 50% since I consume all video content on either my phone or my tablet (where I don't have access to AdBlock), and I find the amount of ads I have to go through to watch a video so annoying that I'd rather not watch it at all.
As a result I spend my free time on Coursera or listening to audiobooks instead and I log in to YouTube once a day to have a quick scroll through the subscriptions page to see if there's anything worth watching. Keeping the amount of ads in mind and the stress they cause me, I am more selective and will often not click on a video that I previously would. And I don't mindlessly binge-watch video for hours on end any longer.
With the new monetisation coming in place, I can see my consumption of YouTube declining even further to the level of Google - use it as a tool, when you really have to and not just for entertainment. And I welcome it! Just thought to share a perspective of a consumer rather than a creator.
On the other hand I do understand YouTube's move. After all, it's their platform and they're not running a charity - people often forget that it's not their birth right to use a company's product or a service without paying for it one way or the other.
It is superficially sad, but as you point out the 2nd order effects are really positive. Google has really done us all a favor by being actually more authentic: they're saying "We're an Advertising company ." (the period is said out loud). They are a tech company insofar as it serves their ad business. They're not a general tech company, and they have no interests or pursuits in anything else unless it is to develop new lines of ad revenue.
I've stopped using Chrome, use gmail only for dealing with companies (their spam), rarely watch YouTube anymore, and use DDG for search. It's _very_ noticeable how little targeted advertising I receive anymore. I have developed a whole new appreciation for my DVD and BluRay collection, and now feel compelled to buy up whatever is available while they last. Physical, own-able media is becoming frighteningly scarce.
I think the Google situation is a deliberate result of restructuring under Alphabet, and in terms of business it's wise. Google is about ads. Other companies of theirs will be about other things.
YouTube premium gets rid of all the ads, unless creators have embedded them in the video.
There is lots of good content for toddlers on YouTube, but it is unwatchable with ads. I watch more myself now all the ads are gone, plus you get youtube music, not as good as spotify but good enough.
Cable TV started as paid ad-free TV also. It now has so many ads that it is almost unwatchable at times.
One wonders how much further YouTube can take this - it appears they are approaching the optimal point for extracting revenue from videos, so where is their future revenue growth going to come from?
I miss the YouTube of old rather than this commercialized version. To me, Tik Tok seems like more like the original YouTube than YouTube does.
I for one have become so annoyed with the level of ads that I have reduced my consumption of YouTube. To me, it seems like there is a much higher rate of advertising on a per-content-minute basis on YouTube than there is on TV.
Not true. Cable TV started by simply sending a copy of broadcast TV over coaxial cable, giving the user a more reliable signal (better picture and sound) compared to a "rabbit ears" antenna, and access to programs from distant cities beyond the limits of good radio reception. That broadcast TV, of course, was a live signal which contained ads in the signal that could not be removed.
Cable TV also offered the end user a convenient box with a digital channel number display and remote control for changing channels. The user was able to flip among dozens of channels without having to fiddle with the UHF/VHF tuning controls of their TV: they tuned the TV to channel 3 (or whatever) and could just leave it, letting the cable box do the channel selection. Cable TV was a major upgrade to the TV set. In particular to a basic model or old TV with only knobs for channel selection, no remote.
Cable TV did offer premium programs also, requiring a "descrambler". Those channels were collectively called "pay TV"; separate from regular broadcast TV. These channels were satellite channels; the user could have obtained them alternatively by installing a dish, and paying for the descrambling.
YouTube will push the needle to the extent Cable did and a new platform will be born. It's the circle of technology. Then the next video platform will feel like the YouTube of ~8 years ago.
The maximally optimal value to the end user waxes and wanes throughout the business cycle, and unfortunately we're in the trough.
I'm honestly not sure we're in the trough. The value of Youtube is pretty tightly correlated to the amount of content on Youtube. While you could argue that the signal to noise ratio is worse, it's very hard to argue that there isn't significantly more 'good' (however you define it) content on youtube that makes it more valuable.
I find paying for Youtube premium an pretty great value, because it has some of the best content for any hobby I may be into. It doesn't have the pure depth of hard core educational content like udemy/coursera/khan has, but I'm really not able to consume that type of content enough to run out.
It's also key to note that had Cable NOT pushed ads as far as they had, they still would have been disrupted. It was a rational decision, since revenue today is often worth more than in the uncertain-for-so-many-reasons future.
It's part of why you can't rely on the market or competitive forces alone, if you think something is an issue of public good, you need regulation.
If they didn't show ads I doubt they would have cared as much about time shifting and ad skipping would never have been relevant. Sure would have helped them avoid collapsing.
Let's not pretend they weren't incredibly hostile to watching shows you're paying for already, when you want to and without the ads you paid to avoid, even though they didn't need to even build any infrastructure for it.
Add the rest of their anti-customer policies like bundling channels and it seems clear that their campaign to get rid of all their cable customers simply succeeded.
And none of that would've prevented Netflix from being a more convenient option that let you watch on many more devices, etc. Especially because the early hook here for Netflix streaming wasn't "watch the stuff currently on cable" it was "watch back catalog stuff that isn't anywhere else right now." So that would still get Netflix in the door, and then once they start doing first-run content, game over in the same way. Nobody would want to buy and set up Tivos or Slingboxes and LAN setups and all just to turn their existing cable subscription into a Netflix subscription when they could just buy the streaming subscription separately.
Sure, the cable companies could've theoretically made Netflix streaming before Netflix did - and the broadcast networks kinda-sorta-tried-this with Hulu - but that had nothing to do with their ad load increasing over time. Hulu was way more convenient than watching the same shows on cable even with ads still! But to go all in on a reinvention towards streaming would've been a huge gamble even seeing the streaming train coming right at them.
Those time shifting shows appear on broadcast tv across the nation in different time zones. They are not cable channels but broadcast channels appearing in cable. A tv antenia will pick them up.
The timeshifting is the tv stations defense of segmenting their ad market and protecting against local viewer loss that targets ads to markets.
If you in New York watch Denver's version two things happen. New York loses viewers. Denver gains viewers who's local ads are not relevant and those viewers not included when selling ads.
Sorry, there must be some overlapping terminology.
I mean time shifting as in what devices such as TiVo did where they would record your shows for you and allow them to play them back whenever you wanted. For some reason Cable companies really hated this idea, presumably because... ads I guess?
I think that if they simply hadn't fought against people trying to basically turn what they already provided into something more like Netflix, those tools would exist and be built with a cable package as a backend.
They provide all the shows in a datastream that they would otherwise provide via cable, let other people deal with paying for developing devices to make it easier to use, and price it more reasonably so that it can compete with a Netflix. I don't know if they'd be able to, but since they own the pipes and own the FCC it seems more likely than not. But they'd be doing a lot better than they seem to be now, they just priced themselves out of the market once networks realized that people would just download their content for free if it was too inconvenient to watch. Better a little than nothing...
My understanding, Linus Tech Tips did a breakdown of their revenue, is that Youtube premium subscribers get more money to the creators than ads.
With that, the day they bring adverts into Youtube Premium, is the day I stop paying for it. That would be them going the way of cable companies all in.
Indeed, I've seen revenue breakdowns from a number of content creators and each of them makes it clear that if you have YouTube premium, when you watch a single video you give the creator approximately 10x the revenue of a single free user who only sees ads.
Likewise, the day that they start putting ads into YouTube premium is the day I abandon the platform.
I had Youtube Premium through Google Play Music until Google finally axed GPM.
I was so disappointed by how poorly Google handled that process that I cancelled my subscription and lost my YT premium.
Youtube is completely unbearable without premium - I have no idea how non-subscribers tolerate Youtube content. The ads are so intrusive. I would totally pay $5-$10 per month for a Youtube only subscription but I feel like the $18/mo for a family plan is a bit steep.
Personally I wish all these music streaming services could agree on metadata sharing such that I could enable apps like last.fm to review listening history across every service, and offer my listening history and playlists to every service to receive better recommendations. It feels odd that I can listen to the same song from 4-5 different services that I subscribe to legally, yet none of the services has a complete picture of what I like to listen to unless I pick one and use it as often as I can. I had thought that playlist sync would be a way to improve my recommendations, but it seems most services look at listening history rather than playlists. It's also irritating that every company has its own way of doing playback sync between devices, whether it's AirPlay, ChromeCast, Spotify Connect, Alexa, YouTube app, etc. There is no way things should be this fractured and hard to use for music playback and recommendation in the next decade, we need more standards. :)
Youtube Music's handling of my uploaded music is really poor compared to GPM (sectioned off from everything else), so that alone was enough to make me dump my subscription when GPM was shut down.
Now I run my own Plex server on a Raspberry Pi with an external drive and get a better experience than I had before, minus discovery.
I actually prefer the way YTM segments my uploads from the general catalog, as it gives me some possibly unfounded confidence in the idea that I'm going to be listening to the edition I expect, and not something like a 20th anniversary re-release with 15 extra tracks. GPM has this really bad problem where their treatment of my uploads was seriously broken and I would see, just as one example, multiple copies of every track on one album. I don't see this since the YTM conversion.
I recently found this and use it to get and retain all the videos I like (not just from youtube), it's super simple which is exactly why I like it: https://github.com/tomszilagyi/copycat
How is the mobile experience for YT Music? Looking at switching, I imagine they have the desktop experience down. I love Spotify, but I can't imagine a worse experience outside of their mobile app. The web player was nice but fails to load music two-three times per listening session (to be fair, they are usually 5-8hrs), the desktop application is slow, clunky, and will regularly not play music I have downloaded.
1/ Auto-created playlists, especially after you just search for a song and hit play. On GPM, it would play different covers on the same song (basically all the search results) by default, unless you started a radio, which is a cool concept but was hit and miss in practice. On YTM, it continues with similar songs, and I have liked their selection so far.
2/ The library seems to have increased; I guess they have access to more songs that were YT exclusive for some reason.
3/ While I normally never use video mode on YTM, but once in a while for a cool song, it's nice to be able to seamlessly switch to video and cast to my TV.
On the cons side, I don't like the playlist management and home screen UI (which is what I hated initially), but it's not bothering me much anymore now that I am getting used to it I guess.
Initially, I had planned to just cancel the subscription, but held on because using YouTube with ads was just plain intolerable. I get reminded of this everytime I open a Youtube link on my work account Chrome profile by mistake.
+1 on that last issue. I don't understand why Google doesn't include ad-free YouTube as part of a perk for using Google Workspace. Also I wish I could tell Chrome to open some links in other profiles at all times, and only those links, kind of like Firefox might do. Actually, come to think of it, I probably use Chrome too much and should try alternatives instead.
YouTube Music is so bad I shut down my use of Google for music, unplugged my Google home devices, and migrated to Alexa. Amazon Music is worse than Google Music, but better than YouTube Music.
There's a wide open market for a good music streaming company that integrates with your own albums, that is corporately stable enough not to dissipate after "An Incredible Journey Together". All the different services have weird lockins and major gaps, whether it be uploads, mobile app limitations, interop, etc.
1) You can't organize Albums by artist.
2) Your Youtube (video) likes are included in the pool of liked songs in the music app.
3) Artists you are subscribed to in the music app are included in your Youtube (video) subscriptions.
I can't believe that you actually decided to be held hostage by google and pay them to remove content that they would otherwise only put in front of you if you were looking. Its like paying a restaurant not to harass you and then going to it when you could just go to the restaurant next door without the protection fee. There is also a lot of good content for toddlers IRL.
> Its like paying a restaurant not to harass you and then going to it when you could just go to the restaurant next door without the protection fee.
No, it's like paying the restaurant for the damn food. YouTube hosting all the world's videos forever is not a god given right, nor is being able to watch content people create for free.
I despise ads, absolutely despise them, but gladly pay YouTube the $15/mo to remove them because I know good content needs to be paid for one way or another. There's still a few channels that I like that put in ads during the videos and that's still annoying, but otherwise I never see an ad.
And this is fucking fantastic! Imagine if the web as a whole adopted this. (I know there are efforts including Google's) If I could pay $10/mo to get rid of all ads (explicit and implicit) and have that go towards the creators that I consume content for, then we'd be in a much better place. (imagine if FB just got a cut of that for example, how that would change the dynamics)
I disagree that it is like it is paying for the food. If I had youtube premium and my entire $10 went to only the creators of the videos I watched using some egalitarian algorithm, then I would be into it. However, it is actually more like Spotify where some portion of my $10 (lets say $7, even though it is probably lower) gets put into a large pool and then distributed among all content creators on the site along with everyone else's premium money.
I have a patreon which I budget $20/mo to actually pay the creators that I care about. Don't kid yourself into thinking your YT premium money is going anywhere except unboxing videos and Minecraft screaming videos and the like.
Do you have any source on how they distribute payments? All I can find is this blurb which could be read lots of different ways (likely by design):
"Currently, new revenue from YouTube Premium membership fees is distributed to video creators based on how much members watch your content. As with our advertising business, most of the revenue will go to creators."
I support some creators via Patreon as well, but honestly that's just more work for me as my interests change and some months I don't consume any of their content.
I imagine the truth is that it is likely something Spotify-like or some variation thereof. I'm still ok with that and YouTube does make it explicit that the majority of my sub goes towards creators. FWIW I suspect there are some reasons that are subtle, bug valid, that Spotify for example distributes subscription fees the way it does, which I agree does seem kinda BS at first blush.
> held hostage by google... Its like paying a restaurant not to harass you...
This level of entitlement is just staggering. You can pay for YouTube in two ways; watch adds or pay for add free.
Now, I get that the price for watching adds right now is too high. It simply ruins most content. But your metaphors are still just way out there.
In reality there are now 3 "tiers".
- Premium. Pay with money.
- Get a free taste. Choose if you want it.
- Unwatchable content.
I don't think that is going to work out for YouTube in the long run. But shaming people for being willing to pay for actual loads and loads of quality content is not constructive.
On the other hand, I _am_ glad if this means that random, prudish advertising companies will hold less sway over YouTube at some point in the future, where subscriptions make up a bigger part of the revenue.
I pay $15 / month for the youtube music family plan. That includes ad free youtube and ad free youtube kids.
Youtube kids (with proper video/channel whitelisting) is the main thing my toddlers watch. It has BBC shows (peppa pig), PBS kids, and 2 great kid friendly content crators (Blippi and Steve and Maggie).
Of course there is lots of good "IRL" kids content, but propery setup, Youtube kids is pretty good and fairly priced in my opinion.
Most content is unbearable with Ads so I pay as I do every other entertainment service that I want to spend my time watching. With YouTube most of the revenue (55%) go to the creator which I'm also happy to support.
IMO it's a net positive that it has created new business models that's open to anyone with a camera/mobile.
> decided to be held hostage by google and pay them to remove content that they would otherwise only put in front of you if you were looking. Its like paying a restaurant not to harass you and then going to it when you could just go to the restaurant next door without the protection fee.
Unclear why the attitude. Youtube is a business. It doesn't owe users anything for free regardless of what it did in the past or others have done.
Restaurants? You pay them to dine there. They operate at a profit or try to. And restaurants who offer either (or both) better food or experience get to charge more like any other product or service in life.
Sure google or any business does not exist to provide free things to people.
Paying a fee to disable ads is not new. I've done it so many times before, starting ages ago with Salon.com and continuing on into Patreon-supported podcasts. Why not for YouTube as well?
> They are a tech company insofar as it serves their [sales] business. They're not a general tech company, and they have no interests or pursuits in anything else unless it is to develop new lines of [sales] revenue.
What's the difference from product-driven or subscription-driven tech businesses?
All companies ultimately are responsive to the wants and needs of their paying customers, within the limits of legality and physics. Do not underestimate how important it is that Google’s paying customers are ad buyers, not you.
And why would they not also be responsive to the wants and the needs of the customers who look at the ads, without which the model would not be profitable?
They had to create a service people want to use in order to be able to put ads on it.
Not a business that is purportedly just a publisher. The channel creators were told they could choose their ad model. That was contradicted by this decision.
Imagine your letter carrier started stamping Aunt Agatha's letters with car ads or whatever.
If non customer complaints and responses threaten the ability of the organization to sell to their actual customers, they will respond. Short of that line, the business is not going to be responsive to non-customer complaints.
This is particularly relevant for subscription vs. ad companies, because both of these companies have different kinds of “non customers”. For a subscription company non-customers can be induced to convert into customers via sales, advertising, and features. So for these companies non customers are all potential future customers who should be listened to some. For companies like Google they serve an entire different class of customers. As an individual there is literally nothing you can do to become a Google customer; so unless if your complaints interfere with Google’s ability to sell your attention to their actual customers, then they have zero reason to care about your opinion.
> unless your complaints interfere with [their bottom line], then they have zero reason to care about your opinion
Again, how are the incentives any different whether or not the business is funded by advertising?
Just like how Google knows that a user with a complaint isn't necessarily going to stop using their services and looking at their ads, Apple (for example) knows that a user with a complaint isn't necessarily going to stop buying iPhones.
In that sense I don't see why a "customer" who is paying in ad impressions is any less of a "customer" than one who is paying in cash.
> Apple knows that a user with a complaint isn’t necessarily going to stop buying iPhones.
Nonsense. People switch to android all the time. Apple’s sales depend wholly on continuing to meet the needs of their customers and providing perceived value. If they fell behind Android in perceived value, or stopped producing what their paying customers want they would lose money. Relatively high switching costs dampens this a bit, but there’s no magic that keeps Apple customers buying apple products.
> I don’t see why a “customer” who is paying in ad impressions is any less of a “customer” than one who is paying in cash.
A “customer” who pays in ad impressions is, quite literally, not a customer. They’re a user, at best. The customer is the person who pays the business for a good or service, which in this case is the ad buyer. Google will try to make you happy insofar as it helps them get more money from their paying customers, but the moment there’s a conflict between between the needs of their users and the needs of their customers, the paying customers will always win.
Put more brutally, your relationship with Google has more in common with a cow’s relationship with Nike than a shoe owner’s relationship with Nike. Your attention is the product, as much as the cow’s leather is. Just as we don’t confuse good animal husbandry with a genuine interest in the cow’s long term well being, don’t confuse Google offering features & products as an interest in your productivity and/or happiness.
> there’s no magic that keeps Apple customers buying apple products.
So then what's the magic that keeps Google users using Google products if they stop producing what their non-paying, but ad-watching customers want?
If the answer is "anticompetitive practices", I don't deny that at all, but that has nothing to do with advertising as a revenue model. Just look at Microsoft, they have long been the champions of anticompetitive behaviour and yet they didn't really use advertising as a revenue model until recently.
> Google will try to make you happy insofar as it helps them get more money from their paying customers, but the moment there’s a conflict between between the needs of their users and the needs of their customers, the paying customers will always win.
The needs of the users are the needs of the paying customers, that is what I am saying. Without the users there is no opportunity to have paying customers, period.
> your relationship with Google has more in common with a cow’s relationship with Nike than a shoe owner’s relationship with Nike.
No, that is a totally misleading analogy and I think it perfectly demonstrates what is wrong with this argument. Users choose to use Google products in exchange for ad impressions.
> So then what's the magic that keeps Google users using Google products if they stop producing what their non-paying, but ad-watching customers want?
Free is one hell of a competitive advantage. And again, Google does enough to keep the customers coming back as much as the rancher does to help the cow grow. The rubber really hits the road when you consider customer's need for say, privacy.
Or, try and get Google to help you out if your account gets locked. Good luck. Now if you're having issues with your ad account, they'll happily hop on the phone to figure it out with you....
> The needs of the users are the needs of the paying customers, that is what I am saying. Without the users there is no opportunity to have paying customers, period.
An overlap in requirements is not the same thing as being the same thing. For a short while, the rancher meets the cows needs too.
> Users choose to use Google products in exchange for ad impressions.
Unclear. Users choose Google products because they're free, it's not obvious if they fully understand the implications of that, or if they see that they have a meaningful choice.
I use one streaming service, but always buy a CD when I like something. So many times I had no network connection and got stuck without anything to listen to. Streaming service had offline option, but couldn't play anything as it needed to check keys, which makes offline pointless. Sadly not all music is available in physical format.
Reddit recently limited the number of comments you can read in Safari on iOS devices. Click "more" and you are prompted to create an account or go to their app.
It's been fantastic. Reddit comments decrease rapidly in quality anyway, but I was unable to look away. Now I'm capped - one or two scrolls and I have to go find something more rewarding to do. Thanks reddit!
I had an iPHone for a few months and noticed my reddit time dropped considerably. Part of it was because iPhone (or Reddit? I don't even know who is to blame here) wouldn't let me choose the reddit app I wanted as the default. If a friend sent a reddit link to me it'd try and open in Safari and I'd get annoyed and just ignore it.
I'm back on Android now where I can choose default apps and now if a friend sends a link, I click it and read it, then I click over to the homepage, then 20 minutes goes by as I mindlessly scroll. It's a blessing and a curse to be able to use your phone the way you want to, I guess.
I browse Reddit on iPhone with Apollo. Free account, so can't post but can read anything there, and no ads. If they mess that up too, I'll give up on Reddit for the iPhone.
The integration in iOS is a bit different. With e.g. Apollo installed, you need to "Share" the Reddit page from Safari with the "Open in Apollo" target and it'll open in Apollo.
I only read reddit when a search engine tells me that the answer to a question is there. Sometimes I'm annoyed that I can't read further into a thread... but I tell myself that anything in the weeds probably won't be a great answer to my question anyway. If only search engines had voluntary "I found / didn't find what I was looking for" feedback instead of clickjacking trackers...
They're also doing an annoying then where you have a message if you don't have notifications turned on for the iOS app. If you turn them on, the 'message' goes away. But if you turn them back off, the message comes back! So annoying.
I was making a joke about how some of the larger HN threads the replies span multiple pages and it's not immediately obvious you need to click a link to get to the next page of comments
I'm the same as you regarding reduced viewing time recently... unless I'm extremely motivated, I kill the tab as soon as the ad starts.
It's the same with sites that require javascript to view: I'm sure the content might be good if I whitelisted it - but most the time it's my cue to realize I'm procrastinating and should get back to creating rather than consuming!
It heartens me to know that this sentiment is spreading.
I have some black and white rules set up for myself. The day Whatsapp stops encrypting chats is the day I jump ship. The day Youtube blocks access to those using uBlock, I'll stop going to Youtube. The day old.reddit.com and i.reddit.com stop working, sayonara Reddit.
I've come to realise that a) I just don't derive TOO much value from any of these websites/services, and b) I don't mind paying for value added.
I'd be happy to pay for Youtube. But not 15 dollars a _month_! Youtube is an amateur platform. Charge me maybe 3 dollars a month. 5 if I'm feeling generous. But not 15. And certainly not when it's bundled with Google tracking the living bejeesus out of me.
WhatsApp encrypts your chats, but if that key is 'backed up' for you to anywhere, it's still game over. There's also the fact that they were clearly worth billions to Facebook, and yet had no meaningful monetization play.
Yup. Already using it with anyone who will bother with it.
I deleted Facebook way back when, on the basis that anyone who couldn't be bothered to find me via another route probably didn't care that much for me to begin with. Will happily apply the same principle for Whatsapp. Parents etc. can just call me the old-fashioned way :)
In my opinion YouTube Music is more than good enough to be compared to Spotify and the other music streaming services, and paying for YouTube Music gets you YouTube Premium (no ads).
I've always preferred Google Play Music/YouTube Music to Spotify so I'd be paying for it anyways but getting adless YouTube along with it makes it a great value, for me.
I also don't know if I particularly agree with your characterization of YouTube as an amateur outlet nowadays, since there's just SO MUCH MONEY in some of the channels.
>I also don't know if I particularly agree with your characterization of YouTube as an amateur outlet nowadays
Yes, YouTube is an amateur outlet for sure, at least the majority of it, just see how many worthless information and popular advices there is in the platform.
"After all, it's their platform and they're not running a charity - people often forget that it's not their birth right to use a company's product or a service without paying for it one way or another."
A few more consumer perspectives:
Google still does not own the videos. It is still not their content. They will not pay contributors for content.
As someone who has been using the web since 1993 I can assure anyone reading that there would still be widepspread video sharing on the internet even if no company such as YouTube existed that tried to monetise the phenomenon. Consumers pay dearly for internet connectivity and bandwidth, many of them enjoy playing around with the internet for fun and they will use the network for all manner of data sharing, including video, even in the absence of advertisers and their service partners (who are usurping a significant portion of that user-financed bandwidth).
Google may not be running a tax-exempt charity for the benefit of consumers, however they are running a corporate welfare program for over 75,000 people. (Nevermind the amount the corporation pays in tax.) This will change if and when profits start to drop.
With respect to this announcement, it appears Google won't share the proceeds from ad sales unless the YouTube contributor's video meets a certain threshhold of traffic, enough to be in the so-called "Partner Program". Many video contributors will receive nothing despite their viewers having to suffer though pre-roll and other ads interrupting their "user experience". In a way this reminds me of domain name registrars that place ads at domain names that customers fail to renew.
I absolutely agree with this comment though. Changes such as this are evolutionary pressure that may lead us to a better internet, one that is less commercially driven by advertising under the fiction of "free". No matter how large these websites, excuse me, "platforms", have become I still believe the web and the internet are meant to be non-commercial and user-driven. As the network has grown, most users are not corporations.
Add more straw. Break the camel's back. What comes in the aftermath will surely be better.
It's worse when you have no idea if you're even _interested_ in the video you're going to sit through two unskippable ads to watch. It degrades the experience considerably.
I used to use the YouTube app on my firestick to stream music while working around the house. One of my favorite bands - who I personally know and who don't put any ads on their videos - releases entire albums in a single 30-40 minute long video.
YouTube now throws 4-6 ads in the middle of the videos, often right in the middle of the songs.
It's worse when you are trying to put a soothing music to put your baby to sleep and it starts with a loud ad which wakes her up. Or now that she is a toddler, her nursery rhyme videos have political campaign ads in the middle of the song.
One of the best things about the ads on youtube was that if they sucked or weren't relevant you could skip them, sending a signal that the ads should not be shown.
I suspect that the platforms have started to realize that personalized ads aren't better than content relevant ads, because I have several times seen ads on Facebook that were just targeted to people who live in my country and are over the age of 18, ie not targeted at all. Yet Facebook presumably showed me those ads because that is what they thought would make them the most money.
YT Premium still supports creators while Ublock Origin denies creators one of the easiest ways to be compensated for their work. That's a pretty big difference.
True, though most of the videos I watch these days either have explicit sponsor mentions, or I support though patreon. My general feel on adblock is that it is a reasonable step against an abusive advertising industry. That it harms creators is the side effect of the advertising industry's overreach, and is not a moral fault of the end user for acting in self-defense.
Nevermind the fact that for the vast majority of creators, their advertising revenue is 100% up to the whims of some bullshit black box "AI" algorithm on whether they are worthy of money they earned or not.
Most of the valuable youtube creators don't care much about their ad revenue and prefer to curate out of band sponsorships and patreon. And if I wanted to actually support them, I'd invest in them through patreon, not watch an atrocious ad that will likely give them 30% of 5 cents
You wrote something that is completely obvious to anyone but some how its surprising what little thought I had put into it... I'm calling it: "Employed by robots" because it goes well with the "Trial by robots". Just those 2 make for "Governed by robots".
We still have some humans in the board room who could theoretically switch things off just like the switched them on but its somewhat naive to think their job description allows for it.
This leaves only governments. I could see myself write government automation even while fully aware of the above. If the pay is right, nice coworkers, interesting stack. ~rolls eyes~
The point is there usually isn't a premium service for sites blocked by UBO. So doing just YT Premium with UBO for other sites would only entrench YT and deny creators on other services a significant source of income.
Maybe if advertisements don't work for them, and the subscriptions work for YouTube, they'll roll out subscriptions too. But to be honest, I just hate advertisements, and so I'll block them, and I'll also subscribe where I can because I want to give back something too.
I feel the same way about Twitch. They recently added unblockable, unskippable ads unless you subscribe to the specific channel that you're watching and I just don't watch Twitch any more for the most part. It's especially annoying when it's the same few ads in rotation over and over for products that I will never be interested in.
It doesn't help that the ads on Twitch are the lowest of the low in terms of quality so you have no desire to stay around. Also their way of doing preroll ads is just bad, you'll get to watch like 5-10 seconds of the channel before the ad just suddenly cuts it off, unlike YouTube or others where the ad is shown first then the content after.
I've noticed the same. When I go looking for some video on youtube, I first pause, prepare my query in my mind and then open youtube & rush to type what I prepared, sift quickly and try to find what I'm looking for, then close the tab/quit the app when I'm done. It's the same feeling as dashing into a hostile store trying to upsell you on stuff and waste your time, when all you needed is 1 thing.
For actual video hosting, assuming ad revenue is not desired, Vimeo seems pretty good.
I find it hilarious that YouTube's iOS app is always pushing me to try a trial of their premium product, one of the major selling points being that videos continue to play in the background when you close the app.
When, in fact, closing the app is the most reliable way to get YouTube to stop playing. From inadvertent clicks in the Wrong Place on the screen that launch some crap or play some ad, to autoplay, as soon as my content is over, I can't wait to kill the app and make it all stop. It's a hell of a lot easier than finding pause/stop.
These ads do something to my mindset that really puts me in a bad place. I used to spend hours on youtube. I loved watching videos related to my hobbies etc. Now, it seems like a chore.
That's a very good point! Add to that YT's abysmal organization of subscribed channels and their terrible recommendation engine. I have to say I really like it.
I have to agree about the recommendation engine. I know there is a lot of interesting new content that I might be interested in uploaded every day, but for some reason it's recommending years old videos that I've already watched AND voted on. WTF?!
Yes! I am regularly in the mood to watch something on YouTube - mostly new documentaries on societal/political subjects. But I just can't find anything relevant. Also the search function is critically handicapped. It's really frustrating. They are not increasing my time on YouTube, they reduce it.
The recommendation engine was intentionally crippled because it was radicalizing people who were into conspiracy theories, militias, terroristic acts, etc. It sucks but I assume there's some work being done to get a new engine out without sending people down a rabbit hole.
For that I actually have a nice observation:
I always clear my cookies and website data on browser quit, and never login into Youtube. Which means I get a pretty vanilla "recommendation" experience, additional tracking attempts from Google put aside.
Visiting youtube, I could swear that the recommendations Youtube is trying to shove my way only change after several weeks or sometimes even months, it is always the same 8 videos on top of the front page for very long periods.
It starts to get somewhat relevant after I watch something, but then it looks like their recommendation engine does nothing more than "Recommend to user x the n most popular videos of roughly the same category as the last video user x watched" with a little bit of shuffling 1-3 videos from a larger set between those, sometimes, and that appears to be it.
I’m subscribed to an old channel, with 200 videos that need to be watched in order. They are all long enough that I have to stop at least once in the middle, sometimes as many as 3 times. If I come back or switch devices, I have to go to my history to find the video I was watching, because recommendations either get the previous or next videos half the time.
Unfortunately, most of my YouTube viewing is not recreational/ entertainment. I use YouTube primarily for DIY videos, Home Building, and other similar educational/ Howto videos. I just don't see a lot of alternatives out there so I'm kind of stuck with YouTube.
Preroll ads are the worst because quality varies so widely I end up wading through multiple ads for crappy videos.
Is there a good resource for how-tos out there for a fee?
Ad-free youtube is $10/mo. I get the impression from patreon and Consumer Reports that a lot of monthly services expect people to sign up and quit as needed.
Honestly, sounds like a VPN in a small country would work great. Just tunnel through Moldova and enjoy a better Youtube and even Internet experience haha... Or just pay for premium...
For anyone not familiar, Vanced is hacked Google binaries. It's the YouTube app, but with features enabled for free and ads blocked. They've been around a long time and are active on XDA.
I use Vanced on my phone, but if you're not into hacked binaries, NewPipe is what you want: https://newpipe.schabi.org/
There's the risk that Google will ban your account as it has done previously to some users, losing access and data hosted in their ecosystem (Gmail, Docs...), that's the thing that scares me the most. But yeah, Vanced (and the new YT Music) is amazing.
I looked this up. This seems to be fear mongering. There are no confirmed cases of stuff like this happening. Too lazy to dig up the links, but go search for yourself. (Reports in YTVanced reddit and NewPipe github)
The APK from F-Droid has been pretty broken for the last month, and for some reason isn't getting updated. Anyone thinking of trying out F-Droid should just grab the latest release from the GitHub repo.
> on either my phone or my tablet (where I don't have access to AdBlock)
I think it's amazing you're putting up with devices that work against you. If my phone would force me to watch ads I would get a new phone tomorrow.
I wish I could say the same thing. In my younger years, I was pretty hardcore about hacking devices and having complete control of them. But SO MUCH TIME was spent debugging issues and staying ahead of the "bad guys." And I couldn't count the literally years of time I've spent fixing broken devices.
Nowadays I just don't have that time. And the bad guys have evolved from mischievous to felonious (and I have a lot more to lose. I still harp on privacy and security, but now I do it behind a couple of walled gardens. I love that my devices "just work."
I know it's a trade off, and I'm certainly fighting for more regulations of FAANG. And I am supporting the FOSS/open device movement, and look forward to the next phase where those "just work".
A big difference I see is how much money does Google make me "watching"/skipping ads in a month? I find it hard to believe it's around $10/month. What are rates now a days?
> Restaurants extort me to pay for food if I want to eat there.
> Paying for something not to happen is different than paying for something in return.
The rough metaphor about restaurants, is not an equivalent situation.
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> you pay the content creators by watching the ads with your time or the subscription
To clarify, you believe that there is an ephemeral currency of attention.
Your attention (which was to be directed at the content creator) can be redirected forcefully, unless you pay in money. I'd be remiss to call it outright extortion, but the parallel is there.
In the cases of both youtube and reddit, how would one suggest they pay for the developers, and their massive hosting costs? If not ad revenue, then what? Subscriptions? That's a hard veto from a high percentage of users.
How do you handle driving on roads with billboards? Or walking through a city? In most of the US, the number of outdoor places you can go without advertising attacking you is dwindling. Europe seems better regarding roads (fewer billboards and more highways with none) but similar in cities.
The rise of blindingly bright LED billboards in the US feels like all the downsides of a sci-fi dystopian world without any of the upside like self-driving hover cars.
Actually, most billboards around the roads in Czech Republic are being dismantled due to being too startling to drivers - the advertisers fought it quite hard, even placed big Czech flags instead of adds to the billboards due to some provision in the law saying you can't just remove a flag of the country. But the ultimately list and billboards around roads are going away.
Also more thought is now being given to "visual pollution" where unsightly advertising is bastardising valuable architecture in cities.
Hopefully both initiatives will proliferate alse to other countries. :)
Good to hear :). I think in the US some places must be much worse than others. Here in Portland, Oregon, on a 7 mile round trip (without much overlap) through the urban core that I make regularly by bike I only see maybe four billboards, and all but one (a not too large sign of a stadium that mostly advertises events there) are the traditional paper type (or whatever it is that they use). Most are near highways or highway access so I assume anyone who uses highways regularly will see more of them. There are also some small advertisements (also not LCD) on bus shelters, although there aren't many bus shelters. I rarely notice any of them unless I am stopped at a traffic light near one. It took me a while to even remember most of them. I'd still prefer fewer of them, but it isn't at all comparable to using the web without an adblocker. Additionally, there is no chance that the billboards will install malware on my computer.
There's a fundamental difference between a billboard that is just sort of in your field of view as you walk down a street, and a billboard which blocks your path, not letting you continue on your way until you finish reading it from top to bottom.
It’s not a charity, but it’s also the standard platform bait and switch: provide years of great service to capture users and creators and gain network effects, then turn on the users and content creators to exploit them after there are no alternatives. Where else do we go now? When YouTube went down the other day, billions of people stopped being able to watch most online videos for a while
Interestingly this will probably mess up google search results as well. There are so many things in youtube that should have been a text post but are videos on youtube (for example how to do something technical), that somehow mysteriously come out as top results on google search. They've been rendered even more useless than they were before. I'm already not willing to sit through a video if it could have been text, but I'm sure some people are. I wonder if a slate of ads before, and during, will kill of that type of content.
Honestly, I consider the existence of such things kind of toxic, which is a weirdly extreme view, I admit, so I'm kinda rooting for these types of videos to get pushed out of the results.
My trick for this is to disable the Youtube app on my phone and only use the browser to watch videos. Combined with DNS66, the few ads that do make it through on the site can be dismissed by just refreshing the page, which is easy to do in my browser.
This also works on iOS and you can even get a shortcut to let you bypass PIP being disabled and by pausing the video 2-3 times in picture mode you bug it out and can play the video with the screen off - not very convenient for short videos but longer ones it works well with.
> I consume all video content on either my phone or my tablet
I dunno which mobile platform you are using but I use iOS and if you watch YT via the browser you can block ads with its content blocker and you can even use some JavaScript in an shortcut to re-enable picture in picture (it’s a little more of a hassle, you have to press share then the pip custom shortcut but it works).
On the other hand, it makes it harder to filter out bad content.
When i search for a video on some language/system architecture, it's often difficult to find the official team videos. One good thing to do is to start playing one video after another form the search results. Usually the very first one without a pre-roll Advertisement, is the one you want.
Biggest issue for me is less the time cost and more the disruption created by an ad in the middle of a video. It's maybe 10% as valuable to me to watch a 10-minute video with two ad breaks in the middle vs a 10-minute video with ads at the start. It's like trying to watch a TV show while someone is throwing axes at your head.
> I find the amount of ads I have to go through to watch a video so annoying that I'd rather not watch it at all.
Could you share what that amount is? One ad every how many minutes? I ask because I suspect that it depends on the geographic region of the user and other factors, and I’m curious how bad it is in some places.
This is exactly what I had in mind, I will definitely gain more time doing other things. With their recommendation engines youtube was already turning into cable television and now there's no escape from it.
This will also incentive us to find other methods of sharing/consuming. P2P perhaps?
I have posted tutorials and art on YouTube since before they were Google.
I am also glad that this move has finally given me the push needed to delete my channel entirely. I don't try to make money off it, I have no interest in Google getting to.
I had the same issue with YouTube ads on mobile. There's an open source YouTube app called Vanced (yes, with out "Ad") which runs exactly like the official YouTube app but you have the choice to turn off ads.
I understand that I can’t really complain about a service I don’t pay for. That’s fine. I just don’t use it, and my life is so much better for it! Besides, YouTube is blocked at work / on vpn anyway :)
There's a chrome extension which blows away the recommendations sidebar in YouTube. For me, installing that was enough to break any mindless video watching.
This was my first thought as well. Both coursera and audiobooks are not free or ad-supported. Would these paid alternatives be as attractive if they had ad-supported options?
I watch more youtube than any other video platform and I am happy to pay the $13/month to be ad free. Is it a sustainable business model? That’s for the bean counters at Alphabet to know. For now, I am content.
I was happily a subscriber, but like most things Google does, they decided to switch things up for the sake of different. What I don't like about paying $18/mo for Youtube (family) is that they are still collecting truckloads of data about me and using it to target MORE advertisements.
If I pay for a service, it my expectation that you provide me a way to opt out of your additional revenue opportunities. To that end, $18/mo for premium is gouging, in my mind. The fact that Youtube is implementing even more ads tells me the service is bleeding customers or cash, maybe both, and Google is handling this by making the barriers HIGHER.
Google has their hooks deep enough into most people - charge $3.99/mo for an ad-free experience and grow the subscriber base.
I see people loudly complaining about it. I don’t watch YouTube. I went from a paying customer to ditching it entirely. But clearly everyone complaining love YouTube and are watching hours and hours of video. So why not pay for it? It’s more sustainable in the long run.
You have to pick and choose among them and the million other subscriptions though and they aren't the cheapest. If you watch it enough then I suppose it makes sense. Let's just go back to cable with one known cost.
Exactly my thought. As much as I hate advertising and Google business practices, I would rather pay to avoid advertisements if that is an option. For $15/month family plan for 6 users, I find it to be a reasonable deal.
That... is quite steep as compared to India, where the family plan for YT Premium (if I recall correctly) costs Rs. 99/month, approximately $1.33/month. PPP is real :|
I do this. Its not cheap (12$ month), but it comes with "youtube music", which I'm starting to use a bit. like all things google, its a little difficult to figure out exactly what is going on.
I signed up for Red a few weeks ago and cancelled my Spotify account. Ad-free videos, offline vides and a reasonable music service. I think it's a great deal.
I pay for Youtube premium and that's not a comparison I had even considered.
The ad supported web has led to so many people feeling entitled to consume content for free. People have gone so far to feel that the ads themselves are the problem, without realizing that without them, you would have to begin to pay the real cost of the service.
Funny how so many people find watching a single movie (lets say you watch cheap, $8) for two hours acceptable, but unlimited access to billions of hours of content for $10 is unacceptable.
They work today, but Google could fool them by embedding the ads in videos, I mean cutting a video and inserting the ad inside, not playing a separate segment, so that it can't be detected by the adblockers. But then video makers could fight back by using AI to compare it with the original without ads and distributing cue lists automatically downloadable by browsers extensions telling the player to skip from A to B to hide the ad. then Google would fight back again by making the ad embedding random at each play, so that cue lists wouldn't work anymore, or disabling skipping within the ad segment, and so on. It will never end.
It is pretty clear that Google is attempting to monetize everything down to the spaces between zeros and ones, changing their own rules when it suits them, and won't stop before anything. This is extremely unprofessional; I wouldn't rely on them for anything serious.
I'm far from being a communist but I disagree with you.
You have a third option in this case, block the ads.
If it's possible to block ads, it's a minor weakness in YouTube's business model - which, don't get me wrong, it's a pretty good model for generating revenue with a relative small team (given it generates 5bln$ in revenue).
If YouTube wouldn't allow users blocking ads it wouldn't be as popular.
In the same way I don't like copyright being enforced by governments (eg. DMCA, getting ISP to disclose data about their customers): if you sell your product so much that you can't find a way to understand and legally persecute which of your users is breaching your contract and redistribute your goods, that's the way of the market to tax the wealth you're making.
And I live off selling software (which gets copied and distributed on warez sites hosted where I can't touch them).
I'll pay that market tax happily, given I'm getting some marketing in return and stopping it would cost me more in legal fees than anything. What I don't like is paying for an inept government to steal my money, provide crappy service and threaten me with jail if I don't pay.
A few months ago when YouTube decided to auto-add ads on all videos, my watch time on YouTube decreased by more than 50% since I consume all video content on either my phone or my tablet (where I don't have access to AdBlock), and I find the amount of ads I have to go through to watch a video so annoying that I'd rather not watch it at all.
As a result I spend my free time on Coursera or listening to audiobooks instead and I log in to YouTube once a day to have a quick scroll through the subscriptions page to see if there's anything worth watching. Keeping the amount of ads in mind and the stress they cause me, I am more selective and will often not click on a video that I previously would. And I don't mindlessly binge-watch video for hours on end any longer.
With the new monetisation coming in place, I can see my consumption of YouTube declining even further to the level of Google - use it as a tool, when you really have to and not just for entertainment. And I welcome it! Just thought to share a perspective of a consumer rather than a creator.
On the other hand I do understand YouTube's move. After all, it's their platform and they're not running a charity - people often forget that it's not their birth right to use a company's product or a service without paying for it one way or the other.