It’s too late for that. On YouTube even if you pay for premium, you still get ads in the form of sponsored segments, and probably in the recommendation algorithm (I’d be surprised if big corps had no way to pay to bump their videos in search results).

More and more platforms will try the « paid subscription with ads » in the coming years.

When people recognize how cognitively harmful ads really are, there will be a movement to pirate and rehost all content decentrally, edited to remove interstitials and sponsored segments.

Ads targeting children would be an international crime if our world was just.

People have been warned about the cognitive harm from advertisements for probably over 100 years now. Its not going anywhere unfortunately, its too profitable.

But with premium the scroll bar at least will tell you where to scroll to to skip the ad via the histogram.

With SponsorBlock it will skip the ad for you.

The sponsored segments as in advertising that creators have negotiated directly? I have YouTube Premium and that's the only type of ad I get, I don't get anything else.

I have SmartTubeNext and I don’t even have that.

When a free experience can do better than the premium experience, your product have a problem.

I’m not even sorry about SponsorBlock, creators still get their money, I don’t have to watch the sponsored segment, and advertisers have no way to know I didn’t watch it. So it’s zero impact on the creator, big impact on my sanity.

> advertisers have no way to know I didn’t watch it

Actually per-segment viewership gets tracked by YouTube and displayed in the YouTube creator tools. I wouldn't be surprised if those statistics get used when negotiating deals with sponsors.

>and advertisers have no way to know I didn’t watch it

So YouTube has no idea that the content was skipped by SponsorBlock? I find that hard to believe.

Yeah, it's unquestionably tracked what exact portions of a YT video your browser actually loads and plays. All playback is controlled by JS and there's no reason YT doesn't hook into those actions and record metrics of every play/pause/seek/mute/etc. user action (in addition to actual network requests made by the browser).

I'd like to imagine a future where I can stream fractions of a cent per minute/hour to the video provider or creator in exchange for consumption of that content. That way I only pay for however much I actually consume and the platform doesn't have to serve me ads to be profitable or sustainable. This could even work without needing to register for an account, using the HTTP 402 Payment Required response status code that already exists [0][1], something your browser could handle in the background.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402

[1]: https://docs.lightning.engineering/the-lightning-network/l40...

I know all things cryptocoin are anathema here on HN, but one of the stated goals in the satoshi whitepaper was enabling micropayments. I don’t want to give my credit card info out to every video creator I watch, but what if I could load a digital wallet and pay for streams exactly as you suggest?

In such a world your digital wallet Id becomes just as important as your credit card number and you’re back to where you started.

Except you can have multiple wallets, no credit score affected, and cheaper or no transaction fees.

Just my 2c as a layman:

This makes sense in my head, if there's an incredibly small cost to watching someone (which would add up if that someone thousands of views) and the experience doesn't revolve constantly around trying making me constantly want to consume something else.

That sounds very interesting and fair but way less profitable than just selling ads, so it'll never happen under capitalism.

It's easy to forget that in reality it's almost never a case where we "can't find alternatives", it's that they are incompatible with profit seeking.

For some yes, for some no.

In late 90s and early 2000s, before all Youtube, Facebook and Instagram crap, some passionate people produced content wich was available for free on their web pages.

I don't feel the need for need mass culture and mass entertainment crap, but if I would feel such a need, I would install cable TV and/or pay for it.

This era had shoutads/clickagents, eads and doubleclick for monetization. Banner ads were obtrusive and complained about at the time. I remember text ads google was pushing were actually a welcome change.

Most people are probably too poor to do too many direct payment options, so they'll get choosier about what they consume, and advertisers will still be SOL. Strangely I don't feel any pity for the human-shaped turds.

Probably 10 times as effective per money unit

Don't replace them.

Yes.