These tech companies have underestimated their utility. They are mostly providing mindless time wasters. If you try to charge money or create inconvenience, people will look for something else to do.
Their attention is your lifeblood, and you’re actively giving them reasons to look elsewhere. The VC grow-at-all-costs business model is fundamentally flawed. It doesn’t scale when profitability becomes a priority.
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Their attention is your lifeblood, and you’re actively giving them reasons to look elsewhere.
My attention is all the currency YouTube will ever get from me - and it should be enough. If I post videos to YouTube (for nothing in return) and I talk to people about videos I saw on YouTube or link them to videos - then I am a net gain for Google and they should treat me as such. If anything, they should be working (nicely) to try to get me to want to pay (or view ads) and just be thankful I’m there if I don’t pay (or view ads). Instead they’ve chosen to work at ensuring everyone is so goddamn pissed off at their bullshit that they’d rather make it their full-time job to never give them another dime. Good job, Google! Smart!
PS: Oh hi there YouTube shills, I thought I would see you here.
Look I hate YouTube ads too, and ads in general, but let’s say every user of a service is like you. Attention is all the currency they’ll ever get from you, that’s totally cool, absolutely. I’m totally that way too. But they’ve got to make money somehow, so if you’re not the paying customer, someone else has to be.
I’m not saying it has to be ad sales either, but if we want a world in which we can use services for free without ads, we need to come up with an alternative way for them to make money. It has to come from somewhere, and by the bucketload.
If every user thinks like you, then it doesn’t matter how many people you talk to or share links with, you’re not a net gain on their service, you bring nothing to it.
Why should they, or anybody, be thankful that you honour them with your presence, if you contribute nothing of value? What makes you so entitled to use somebody’s product for free with no strings attached?
Ads suck, I’m eager for us to move past them once we figure out an alternative that keeps products in business and us receiving things for free. But we can’t deny the reality we live in right now either. Even huge companies like Google (who yes, do suck) have to make money to survive.
I think generally you will find that people of this opinion hold that it is unreasonable that we have privatized basically all of the internet infrastructure. These people tend to be in favor of expecting the consumer spends more on hardware for hosting, and enthusiasts, hobbyists, non-profits, and occasionally companies develop the software necessary to make the internet function, rather than companies just paying for tons and tons of warehouses of servers, and then just forcing the software to all become fucked up walled gardens while the actual utilities everyone rests upon is left to rot.
Huh, I wonder why people holding that opinion would be on Lemmy…
Surely a coincidence.
YouTube creates no content and it’s reliant on people volunteering their time and talent to them. Fuck the idea that we need to pay google to access content they only host and don’t pay fairly for.
Look I hate YouTube ads too, and ads in general, but let’s say every user of a service is like you.
I understand the message about needing to fund services to exist, but that stance I feel doesn’t always really work too well. Since if other users were like them then it’d also mean there might be a lot of stuff that doesn’t exist anymore which could be a pro like microtransactions ceasing to exist and move to subscription model failing.
And for YouTube might be completely different where depending on their taste maybe click baits turned people away if the person hated them, so those don’t exist. And long winded videos attempting to take advantage of the algorithm failed if they were someone who didn’t like videos that wasted their time, and everyone is like them.
Reddit might still support third party apps if everyone was like them, and lemmy bigger. That’s why if everyone was like them argument is just a weird one, since it turns minority actions into a majority and changes way too many things to focus on one singular thing.
To answer your questions - users such as this bring something more valuable than ad money. They bring data. Google harvests data and metrics on users in a million ways, packages this up, and sells it for considerably more than they make on ads. In free services such as this, YOU are the product.
Ads suck, nobody wants to watch them, and they simply represent google maximizing shareholder value at every opportunity, as they are legally bound to do under American capitalism. YouTube ads are not a critical revenue stream that will make or break them.
Copy-pasting this from a comment I made a few days ago. I’m so tired of this misconception. Google’s business model literally disincentivizes selling personal data. The business model is built on selling targeted advertisements. Google wants to keep this data to itself because it gives them a competitive advantage in the ad space.
Selling your data would give competitors power in the marketplace. So yes, Google collects data and uses it, but no, Google does not sell your data. It sells targeting BASED on your data.
Very different, regardless of if it is any better.
Not all interested buyers are in the ad business, and governments can make payments in a way that is difficult to audit from a third party perspective, definitely not in any currency or a change in the balance sheet. I wish things where different but seems to me that paying won’t protect me from them harvesting every bit they can.
they’ve got to make money somehow
But they have been, and for years. All the years I’ve run a smartphone Google has harvested and profited from my data. From Gmail to Chrome (before I switched) to Maps, etc - they have profited from people’s data at scale. So the argument that they need to make money somehow falls flat for me.
Also, if they charged like $2 a year to block ads, plenty of people would buy it. But like most things lately, the enshitification of our user experience continues. It’s not enough for companies like Google to “make money” - it’s never enough and their greed has no boundaries.
That’s why you see people like us pushing back - enough is enough.
Google doesn’t make money directly from harvesting your data, they make money from harvesting your data then showing you ads based on that data. So if you’re running an ad blocker then they aren’t making money from you (unless you pay them for stuff like subscriptions and apps). As ad blocking becomes more common they are definitely going to get more draconian to try to claw back that money (growth is infinite, profits must go up /s).
Also BTW Google probably makes more like $50 per user per year on average (looking at revenue and internet population) so they would never offer a $2/year ad block unless forced to by regulation.
they make money from harvesting your data then showing you ads based on that data
That’s part of it, yes. But they can also sell ad companies demographic data - males aged 25-44 clicked on this or looked at that for example.
Google probably makes more like $50 per user per year on average
I highly doubt the number is that low.
I will quite happily pay a reasonable price for the privilege of avoiding ads.
I understand why people block ads, even though they are a a free tier, even if I don’t agree with it.
The fact that the cost of YouTube Premium almost doubled overnight is making me rethink my ethics, when my current subscription is up for renewal, I will be reassessing whether to cease watching YouTube, watch YouTube with ads or determine another way of supporting content creators.
I will quite happily pay a reasonable price for the privilege of avoiding ads.
I won’t if the money goes to Google.
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You sound like you’d pay someone “with exposure” for their work.
Youtube produces almost none of their own content, instead they rely on other humans to create that content.
Use your ad blocker if you want, but stop treating youtubers as google employees (they’re not, they often have a much more frustrating relationship than you do) and start supporting them through other means.
To you, those people are just helping you waste your time. if that’s your real argument here, stop wasting your fucking time and do something else more worth your precious time, or start supporting content producers directly through non-youtube methods. Or just stop fucking watching.
Those people aren’t on youtube because they’re buying into corporate google dick-wrangling, they want to produce videos and have them get watched, and youtube is a place that hosts their videos for free AND gives them ad revenue share for hosting youtube ads.
You aren’t some hero for adblocking youtube but still watching it. google won’t notice your small dip in their revenue, but the youtuber who made it will.
Wanna support the people who entertain you (or, i guess, “waste your time”, if that’s what you consider entertainment to be — if all you want is to waste your time, don’t ads do the same thing for you?). Pay them directly for their content. Want to take a fake stand that supports nobody but yourself and your own inconveniences, install an ad blocker and boast on the internet about how you’re totally fucking over google and the people who create youtube content by doing so. But don’t treat yourself like some hero for doing so.
You could’ve stopped after the second paragraph.
Who are you gonna defend next, the landlords?
I was never defending google or youtube.
I was defending the people who produce content on youtube, and who do not enjoy the benefits of google’s wealth and market position, and are just trying to create their content.
adblock youtube if you want, but unless you’re also supporting the creators of your content outside of google, i have never paid google a dime either. don’t pretend this is about a big corporation. you just think you deserve to be entertained for free, regardless of who put in the effort to create it.
If you’re REALLY anti-google/youtube, STOP USING THEM. If you watch them with adblock, google can still spin your usage statistics into something that will appeal to investors, but youtube creators will be wondering why their numbers dwindle, because they don’t have investors to (lie to / spin numbers at). You’re still helping youtube, even with an adblocker.
On the other hand, if you support content creators outside of youtube? you are supporting them directly, without youtube’s involvement and without google even getting a cut. I do this for several youtubers, and support even more through merch and etc.
But sure keep telling me i’m defending the landlords because i’m getting mad at you for mistreating the staff and pretending you’re sticking it to the landlords.
Lol what an unhinged rant.
Thank you me for using Adblock. You are welcome me. Couldn’t have done it without me. I am my hero. Thanks me.
Oh please. Youtubers make their money from direct sponsors they themselves advertise in their videos, from viewer sponsor platforms like patreon and from advertising their own product or services such as merchandise etc.
The modern Internet community has an interestingly illogical take on free services. Either use them or pay for an alternative. But the average user has grown up on free services and will happily insist on having their cake and eating it too
If content creators provide 90% or even 60% of value to YouTube, why is Google a trillion dollar company while major content creators are fighting for scraps that fall from their table? Why are content creators who aren’t in the top tier compensated so little for what they bring to the table?
YouTube is nothing without content. Unionize. Stand together and get paid what you’re worth.
I pay for Premium now since it includes music streaming which is convenient to use. If they raise the price too much, I’ll absolutely just go back to mp3s and deal with the ads on YouTube and just watch less content on there. $15 is about my cap before I do that.
There are no better adblockers, uBlock Origin is all you need and is already updated to bypass it.
Unlock origin is the adblocker that people are installing. There are a lot of people with shitty adblockers out there, I guess they are switching.
After YouTube started filling their search results with mostly shorts, I stopped using it for new stuff. It’s terrible now.
Yeah youtubes attempt at being tiktok is just awful and they don’t even have options to not have shorts show up in the feed. On top of shorts just being inferior versions of regular videos without functional controls
This is what gets me. Wanna show me shorts? Ok. But why the fuck am I not allowed to rewind a couple of seconds if I want to? It’s an artificial, completely useless limitation that had no place in 2023.
So, no thanks.
For what it’s worth you can replace the “short” in the url with “watch” to get the old interface back.
Truly thou art a diety
They’re not even doing a good job at cloning TT. You’ve been able to seek in TT videos for a long time now lol
Most of my browser addons are aimed at making YouTube usable. Hiding shorts is priority one
I started blocking those from appearing when they first showed up. There are a number of ways to do it. The Blocktube extension is one.
if you click ublock, select the settings cog, then in the tab that opens select ‘my filters’, you can enter the following to do the same thing:
www.youtube.com##.ytd-rich-section-renderer.style-scopePersonally I avoid installing too many extentions as they are quite literally apps that auto open whenever you just want to browse the web (regardless of if you’re going to youtube, you’re computer runs a youtube specific adblock)
I switched to FreeTube and now all the shorts are on a separate page I can switch over to if I feel like watching them. It’s also got SponsorBlock built in. Now I can enjoy youtube with a clean, faster interface and google isn’t tracking a damn thing. All because google got greedy and made their user experience shit.
Google didn’t get greedy, it’s doing what it’s been doing for years. Before resorting to plunging us into Matrix-like pods, they’re trying to squeeze some more data out of users.
I only wish PiP worked the way it does in Firefox, not in Edge/Chromium. I like to have my browser next to full height video on my ultrawide, but PiP will not go beyond 1080 pixels tall.
I found an extension that gets rid of the shorts, thank god
Also if you have enhancer it has an option to turn off the shorts bar and convert shorts to real videos.
for real the discovery is terrible. it’s all junk and it’s a waste of my time.
Yeah, I hate how crappy search now is.
It’ll show me a couple of videos, then shorts, then some kind of recommendation list. If I actually want to do a complete search for the thing, and only the thing, I’m looking for, I have to go to advanced options and specify I’m looking for videos. JUST videos.
I don’t even care about the shorts showing up in search results. What really irks me is that you get like 3 videos related to search results, then some random unrelated shit, 3 relevant videos, more unrelated garbage, and then the rest of the actually relevant videos. I am specifically searching for something, just show me the damn thing.
the shorts tend to be so bad and pointless. occasionally there is someone who makes an effort, but the number of low effort and garbage ones made me stop looking at shorts ever.
First thing I did when the shorts spam apocalypse started, was create custom ublock filters to strip them out of youtube as much as I could. Too bad I didn’t back them up before my system decided to go poof.
I just copied them over from here. Works for me.
Thanks for the hint! I mostly just ignored the shorts, but I just added that filter list to uBlock in firefox on android and it is much more pleasant when they’re not there in the first place.
Didn’t know about SponsorBlock until all this started. So many just found out ad blocking is possible.
The other person’s been downvoted pretty heavily so I’ll volunteer to accept some.
Sponsorblock is a shitty tool for extremely selfish people that only hurts small-time content creators. You can’t argue about your data privacy, malware, corporate profits, or Google. Sponsorships are literally the least invasive and most direct form of financial support the average person can get for their content without you paying them directly. YouTubers do it because Google is already fucking them over. There’s absolutely no higher justification for it beyond annoyance at an extremely minor inconvenience and a sense of entitlement to the work of others.
You people would go to a little league baseball game and tear down the banner for Tom’s Auto Care if you could. Not every attempt at making money is evil.
The creator isn’t losing money. They get paid to do the sponsorship. Skipping the segment has no effect on how much money they get because they already got it.
There’s also the option of biting the bullet and paying for YouTube Premium.
No. Never. I’d rather stop using YT at all than giving in to coerced user-tracking.
For desktop install and use “FreeTube”.
Alternatively for your android phone you can use “GrayJay”
Never. Pay. For. YouTube. Premium
I assume you need to be rooted for Gray Jay?
No, it works fine for me. It’s just an apk.
NewPipe still works well for me on Android.
Abandoning YouTube is seriously more difficult than abandoning other “non-fediverse” general social media platforms, since it’s got so much useful content that gets straight up ruined by the company that owns the website.
I doubt PeerTube is anything better than Vimeo, at least for now, things can improve after all.
At this point, I don’t even care about the user tracking. I just don’t want to sit through unskippable ads anymore. Especially when it’s the same ad over and over again.
Meanwhile, Youtube engineers and uBlock Origin volunteers are in a war of attrition, updating both the website (youtube, to block ublock) and uBlock Origin (the ad blocker, to unblock the ublock blocker) multiple times a day every day
I feel like uBlock Origin has been coming out ahead more often than not. I haven’t had to manually refresh my lists for the last few days.
Yep, it’s going to be a constant game of cat-and-mouse from now on. Google isn’t going to relent on this.
Oh, of course not. But uBlock Origin and pihole aren’t going anywhere. Hell, they’d probably have to get legislation to slow it down, but good luck fighting that battle. Hollywood’s war against piracy is a good comparison.
something something offer a better service than the pirates
Exactly. We’ve come a long way from $6/m netflix. I would rather give up youtube than pay them $10/m. I GLADLY paid $1/m to a twitch adblocker the other day. Ill pay, but not fucking $10/m when I can avoid it with some complications for free.
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Not even, they’ve already tried to make the case of Anti-adblock bypass violating DMCA and it hasn’t gone anywhere. Unlike piracy where it can and is claimed as a violation of copyright law.
Reminds me of the IM wars back in the latter 90s / early 00s. At one point, briefly, AIM and Trillian were pushing updates to negate each other every few hours.
I love that all the centralized social media networks are scrambling to become shitty for profits right around the time users are realizing that they don’t need centralized servers to host their user-generated content. Users can take their content wherever they want and let these platforms die.
This 100%. Look at forums. Back in the early days, there were lots of little independent forums. Sites like Reddit took over because you could easily keep your identity across multiple forums and see the content from all your communities on one page. We gained convenience, but didn’t think too hard about what we were losing or who we were losing it to. Then along came enshittification and we are collectively realizing what we lost. Federation is of course the solution. As I see it, the only missing piece is monetization. Platforms like YouTube make it easy to monetize page views, Twitter / X is doing the same. That’s much harder in the fediverse.
you could easily keep your identity across multiple forums and see the content from all your communities on one page
RSS feeds have provided this experience for years. The problem is that a lot of sites stopped serving RSS feeds for their content. But sites like rss.app and openrss can be used to get RSS feeds for sites that don’t have them.
RSS is great for content consumption. It’s a shame that many sites stopped serving it- same thing with podcasts, now everyone wants you to listen on this or that platform instead of just publishing a normal RSS feed full of MP3 files.
That said though, RSS doesn’t help for participation, it’s a one-way tech.
I guess if you have forums that put out RSS feeds you could aggregate them together for post titles, but that’s still clumsy. Lemmy does it much more elegantly.
Patreon for monification?
Ads suck. And honestly, if we had less content creators, they’d be fine. There are a lot of absolutely degenerates out there. Let’s cull the herd a bit and let us speak individually with our wallets.
That’s a fair point. Patreon, or whatever comes next, needs to drastically reduce friction. That by the way is why Amazon is so successful, reducing purchase friction. Right now if you have something that a million people will take for free, and you start to charge just one penny for it, your audience of a million will drop to like 12. Not because people don’t want to spend a penny, but because they don’t want to fill out a form and put in their name address credit card number expiration date security code phone number email address etc. If there was a button they could click that was like ‘instant donate 5 cents’ most people would click that a lot.
The closest thing I’ve heard to that was a crypto called basic attention token, which aimed to do just that. They are making a big mistake though in that they are only integrating with Brave browser rather than making a universal plug-in. So the idea of a universal solution is still a ways off I guess. But I think to make it zero friction it will have to be crypto based in some way.
It’s like we’re reverting to the days you would go to homestarrunner.com, illwillpress, etc to see content from people you actually wanted to see content from. Honestly looking forward to it
NewPipe in my mobile and FreeTube in my desktop. Fuck you Google
it’s only a matter of time before those don’t work anymore
It will always be a technology race. And it’s one that so far the content platforms have lost.
Especially given they always abuse the upper hand when they have it, motivating the coding community to solve that problem right quick.
it’s a race that they will win easily with something like client validation
True, but there will be New Solutions. Or no YT for me at least. I am not willing to watch a single stupid add. Not one.
there will be New Solutions.
you’re an overflowing toilet of optimism
Been using these apps for years, when YT does their crap the community gets it fixed and rolled out within a few days (worst has been two weeks).
Lots of thankless devs and contributors dedicated to preventing YouTube from screwing us over!
Try LibreTube on mobile.
It crashes every time I try to open a video
Check which version you’re on. If it’s not 0.19.0 you need to update. F-Droid now has the newest version.
Ok fixed thanks
This is the way.
Ublock Origin works
Brave is ass
They should fucking do an experiment - 2€/$ a month for an ad-free subscription and 3€/$ a month for higher video quality+no ads subscription. I would fucking pour my money into it.
Oh wait, that would not solve lack of sponsorblock. I guess I am not interested then…
They literally had that experiment with Premium Light. €6 for ad free watching, it was all I needed. But they literally sent out a mail they were stopping this tier right before they started implementing more anti-ad blocking measures.
Oddly enough, the “lite” subscription was introduced in some other countries during the time they shut it off in the launch countries.
I wonder if they’re testing willingness to spend using the cheaper sub, then pulling it if it turns out people are likely to buy the pricier plan once the lower tier isn’t available anymore?
Not a penny to those bastards. Should YouTube and Google along with it rot to hell, I don’t care. Maybe we’d finally get better alternatives running at full capacity.
And who will pay for those?
Nebula can only afford to do that because basically nobody who subs to nebula actually watches the videos on it. They did a video about their revenue model and people treat it as a way to support the creators, not to actually watch content
Nebula is pretty awesome and the type of content is great. I miss some light entertainment content though, so the network effect is at work. Still, nebula is the only streaming platform I’d consider subscribing as their policy is great and they do provide good value.
Meh I had nebula a couple years ago and it had some missing features and fairly poor depth of content. The same few bits constantly being pushed. I’m hopeful it improves but I wasn’t using it.
They’d absolutely 100% be losing money with a $2 ad free tier. Ads make significantly more than that per user per month. Same with your “”“solution”“” for higher res video. Bandwidth is goddamn expensive.
I agree, but they’d get a large number of users to subscribe.
And then maybe they wouldn’t complain when they raised the price to $3. And a few months later maybe $3.50. Then $5.
A few years ago, people wouldn’t have paid over $15 for a standard Netflix tier without 4K. But the way to boil a frog is to make them nice and comfy in lukewarm water, then keep increasing the temperature slowly… So even if they lose money, maybe a low price for the ad-free YouTube could make sense, from a business perspective.
Every time Netflix rises prices it makes it to the news (let alone all the drama on twitter/reddit/etc), I don’t know what frog boiling you’re talking about.
Plus, no way would it ever stay at that price. Nothing ever does. The only service I pay for now is spotting, and that’s just to have ad-free music on my half-hour drive to work.
I completely agree the price is far too high.
I actually do subscribe but only because I get a deal through my mobile network that, long story short, cuts the price by two thirds.
I can’t understand their pricing policy at all. And they’re doing a terrible job at explaining their cost basis if it’s actually what it costs to serve video to us (highly doubt it).
Linus Tech Tips did a nice video on that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDsJJRNXjYI
But it should not be done by LTT, but by Google.
Just this morning all the posts (here on Lemmy) were about how everyone was uninstalling their adblockers.
People should be uninstalling Chrome instead.
Adblocking still works fine on Firefox. Just update your UBO filters.
I literally have un-installed chrome. I had to use it on an office machine today and it felt weird.
proud of you
I’m so happy I can freely use Firefox at work. 😅
The default browser at my work is Firefox lol, only our testing team and a few others use Chrome. It’s a pretty welcome change 👍
I find it a little funny when we get Chrome-specific bug reports though
Aside from Firefox, are there any decent non-Chromium-based browsers left?
Nope
There are many. They’re just not as popular.
And that didn’t mention ublock origion, the blocker that still works…
It did at the very very bottom. I almost missed it.
IDK why anyone uses anything else. It has street cred, it improves response times, it is ideologically just about blocking ads
I use tracker blockers and containers too, but every machine that has been in my hands for more than 10 minutes has it installed
That article was full of such blatantly misleading crap. Headline talks about record number of adblocker uninstalls, but the actual data says it was an uptick in both installs and uninstalls. In other words it was people cycling through different adblockers trying to find one that still worked.
I actually removed a lot of ad blockers from all my devices once I found that uBO could do it all. That could be what they are seeing from others as well, perhaps!
It’s like war propaganda, both sides are eager to claim they’re winning lol
Switched finally to ff. So I guess thank you google.
Make sure to turn off telemetry and adjust your browser’s DNS settings.
I went the route of accepting their 2-month trial of Premium, and immediately disabled it from continuing after the 2 months. Hopefully that’s enough time to come up with an acceptable solution that works the way I want it to. Honestly, if Premium was like $5/month, they’d get my money. But for almost triple that? Fuck no, never happening.
Triple for now. After a while they will quadruple it. People will be a paying 100$+ on subscription fees
There was a post yesterday saying that the price of YT Premium Family in Australia is almost literally doubling next month (+88% IIRC). People from a few other regions reported similar. Completely insane.
So today I’ve seen this article saying YouTube failed and another saying they’ve succeeded because of record uninstalls of adblockers.
because of record uninstalls of adblockers
That’s how you know it’s bullshit, because every major ad blocker allows you to disable per site. There’s no need to uninstall. The claim that they’re being uninstalled was written by uneducated propagandists.
yeah like who has a few days of youtube ad blocking not work then goes "that’s it im uninstalling this ad blocker and going back to ALL THE ADS EVERYWHERE
You vastly overestimate the average user. Probably installed an ad locker cause heard from a friend or coworker. Then stops letting them watch YouTube so they uninstall. Go to a non techie and browse the web it’s insane.
inb4 those uninstalls were just because they were installing better adblockers. /j
Considering that, after Netflix enabled anti account sharing, they got an increase in subscriptions, I’ve lost faith in humanity, and believe YouTube will succeed in the same way
Hah. Eat shit and die youtube.
