The cat and mouse game continues. We’ve been in a cycle of YouTube increasing the ads, driving more people to block them. I’m not sure that pushing harder on the audience with the lowest tolerance to ads is the way to go, but I guess we’ll find out. Maybe there’s enough people who will cave and don’t have the technical literacy to find further workarounds.
I’ve been saying for a while, that if YouTube really cared, they’d make you login, or otherwise choose not to let you watch and here we are. Seems like the obvious workarounds are VPNs or alternative front ends.
I hopped on the youtube premium train a long time back, just because I mainly used youtube to consume podcasts and the like and it paid my creators better and got me no ads on youtube anywhere. The first time these BS policies hit me, a paying user, I will cancel it and never look back.
The official statement from Google included in the article makes it seem like Google is de facto fine with paid YouTube Premium subscribers using ad blockers, whether or not the legalese officially allows that. That makes sense since they wouldn’t be showing you ads anyway. So I doubt they’ll be targeting you with this new policy.
Do they prevent relevant data collection by YouTube for people who are logged into YouTube Premium accounts? I doubt it. This is still a first-party data collection context, not a third-party one, and YouTube controls both (enough of) the client and the server.
Anyway, all we have to go here is Google's public statement and their public actions. Nobody who actually knows YouTube's internal thoughts on this topic would be discussing them here. And so far their public statement as quoted in the article lists signing up for YouTube Premium as the acceptable alternative to turning off the ad blocker.
(Disclosure: I did work for Google in the past, but never for YouTube, and not in over 8 years. Of course I don't know their internal thoughts on this topic, and I'm only speaking for myself here.)
Lots of reasons, chief of which being, I primarily consume them at my desk on my spare monitor, and the ones I follow usually have some visual stuff to check out.
Couple that with being a programmer, and I get a lot of mileage out of youtube.
YouTube knows that people who insist to not watch ads/pay premium will find a way to watch it for free, and they don't mind it. They mind of people who got the ad blocker as freeware and watched YouTube without ads when they don't mind getting it.
Looking at YouTube numbers and the growing hype of Arc browser and other freeware blockers, make sense of such a not-insisting ad blocker wall.
This requires that you are logged in to YouTube, doesn't it? I'm not sure how deep in the minority I am, but I use all Google services in private browsing mode if I can get away with it.
Without logging in some features are restricted. Most notably allowing viewing of videos that might be graphic (e.g. involve sensitive topics) you must prove you're 18+ by logging in.
I have a home toolchain making use of flask, yt-dlp, sponsorblock, plex, and ersatztv and it all works so well. I could not imagine watching youtube in a browser or a crappy roku app.
I just have to hope this war never comes to my small village.
It doesn't take much glue to make them work together. I paste a url into a textbox, flask runs yt-dlp in a subprocess, file saves to an area already defined to be a Plex library for youtube videos. I make playlists or ersatztv schedules as needed in the respective UIs.
As a free market maximalist, I believe YouTube has the right to show me as many ads as possible; but I reserve the right to close my eyes and not watch them.
An adblocker helps me close my eyes at scale, and so if YouTube wants to interfere with that, that's where we'll have a little issue.
Yes, they also do and I wholeheartedly support that as well. How many customers are they willing to piss off for their anti-adblock push? That's the question.
Someone who does not watch ads and does not pay for a subscription is not a customer. They are a freeloader. How many freeloaders is google willing to piss off? All of them by the looks of things.
No way I’d pay just to get rid of ads (and honestly that’s all I’d use Premium for). They’ll still track me and get to my personality from what I watch. So I’d essentially be paying them AND they’d still do that. That’s turning me into the ultimate sucker.
The difference is the default YouTube client is actually good. 3rd party clients only exist to implement paid features for free.
When you pay for YouTube you get a really nice experience with no dark patterns. When you pay for reddit or Twitter you get the exact same dumpster fire.
I used to watch YouTube on my TV without adblocker almost every day, but it's now forcing so many ads that my usage has plummeted. There's always at least two for every few minutes of actual video, they're almost all at least 20 seconds long and unskippable.
The few times I do still watch a video I now have a nice (annoying) little ritual: Click and go back and repeat until the first ad is less than 10 seconds, then watch that to the end, then go back and click again which skips the second ad. It's going to play another 2 ads 5 minutes in no matter what, so I might as well.
The subscriber count for Premium and the YouTube revenue have been growing exponentially for the last few years. YouTube premium is cheaper and has better content than almost all the other video subscription services.
I think YouTube might be the exception to this because of how expensive video hosting is. Mastodon is actually doing a great job funding itself but it and Lemmy/Kbin are all text based protocols. The only other sites even close to YouTube’s scale that served videos anyone could upload used to be maybe adult video sites, but even then that’s not really true anymore because of the (good) new verification policies that exist now to help curb abuse and also the second category is far more profitable per video than YouTube is. Something like 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every second and I’m not sure if donations would easily cover the costs at that scale.
How much of that video doesn't need to be uploaded to Youtube though? If costs are distributed among hosters and viewers directly, the entire creator-viewer relationship is going to change, and a ton of useless, low quality content is going to disappear.
Will it? If the creator is really passionate, and the few people that consume the content is passionate, it seems like the opposite will happen. Look at Patreon and Floatplane, for instances of that.
It won't go away though, as long as it has a community that wants it.
What goes away is things that get entrusted to capital. Netflix will run a show for two months and then remove it from the universe because it saves them taxes or something.
The internet has passed around documents containing knowledge since way before the capitalists showed up and built their silos.
We are still a society that is half comprised of people who are only capable of thinking of the internet as a better television, with a ruling class willing to do whatever it takes to give them that, but it has never been that and it will never be that. YouTube is just as doomed as the rest of the Free Money Era corporations.
A lot of video uploaded to YouTube is stuff like “Dorothy’s first school play” or “Epic UFO sighting” or “Josh’s 5th birthday” that gets >1000 views, the stuff that you actually see when you browse YouTube as a viewer is in the minority of content actually uploaded to the site. To the people uploading the video and a very small number of people they know having the video on YouTube is very important, but to almost everyone else it doesn’t matter. I think everyone has a few videos that they like for personal reasons that aren’t massively popular so it really depends on your definition on what needs to be uploaded to YouTube and what is quality content. By YouTube’s metrics Mr. Beast videos are of higher quality than the royal institute’s since they make the site more money so quality is also entirely subjective here.
Twitter doesn't require the infra YouTube does. YouTube can only exist because of Googles physical infrastructure and it's ad revenue subsidizing youtube. There are no replacements because you require their scale to pull it off.
While I agree with where you're coming from philosophically, I think you've got the dynamic wrong. The popular content creators on Youtube actually like the ads, because ads actually put real money in their pockets. So I don't foresee a mass exodus of Youtube posters due to this.
I think the revolutionary spirit is best thought of solely in terms of the viewing side. I personally just use Youtube in a browser because it works well enough. I know for myself, if I ever see some pop up like this I will start using yt-dlp routinely, and it will push me towards solutions like Newpipe for new video discovery.
Follow up: what percentage of the posters who like ads are producing incredibly bad content that works right in the algorithm and blocking people, with Google's help, from reaching quality/relevant videos they want to see?
I don't find very much in terms of actual entertainment there, when I look. I follow a few channels, no idea if they make money at it and I don't care because their videos are 100% related to the topic at hand and not why I need a therapist from aiassistedminimum wagetherapy.com
I’m no fan of ad supported businesses. But if you don’t like Google’s business model, don’t use Google. You don’t need big daddy government to make your choices for you.
> But if you don’t like Google’s business model, don’t use Google.
> And where are people going to go to host their videos for free at scale? It’s not like any little startup can come along and profitably host videos.
If I could get off of Youtube, I would. Like you say, there's not an alternative. It's not even about where I host my videos, that's easy to solve. It's about where everybody else hosts their videos, whether or not I can view a video that gets linked to me, whether or not I can view documentation that companies and events are hosting on Youtube. And it's about where it's possible to put videos where anyone at all will see them.
It is not possible for people to avoid Youtube. Which, it seems like you know given that you're arguing that this impossibility is precisely the reason why a Youtube competitor won't steal their lunch. It's laughable to call consumer relationships with Youtube consensual. And again, you know that, or you wouldn't be so dismissive of people suggesting that bad policy could impact Youtube's network effects.
You can't both have your cake and eat it; if you're going to argue bad Youtube policy won't impact Youtube's bottom line and that there isn't an alternative for people to jump ship to, you can't then turn around and argue that everyone who's using Youtube is there by choice. The fact that there largely isn't a policy Youtube could implement that would cause a mass-migration is exactly the reason why it makes sense to get the government involved in antitrust. The fact that mass-subsidy below-market offerings for hosting make it impossible for a market to compete with Youtube's hosting is exactly why the government should be looking into this business model.
There's a fun trick companies like to play where they offer a service that is massively subsidized by investors or another part of the business, use that to drive any meaningful competition out of the market, and then argue that their unsustainable business is now essential and that this excuses anything they do. And it's mostly bullcrap. We know that Youtube is not playing fair; you know that Youtube is not playing fair or you wouldn't be so confident about its market position.
When was the last time you signed up for a conference or purchased a product and the business/organization linked you to an instructional Pornhub video? When was the last time your parents or your kids sent you a Pornhub video to watch? When was the last time that you went to a news site and there was a Pornhub video embedded into the middle of the article?
Come on, be serious. You know why that comparison is nonsense.
But by all means, if you think that Pornhub is the same as Youtube then tell me more about how a bad Youtube policy and a reduction of network effects on Youtube could feasibly result in a mass-migration of Youtube content producers to Pornhub. I personally don't think that's possible, but maybe I'm massively underestimating Pornhub's potential as a host for lets plays, indie music, general tutorials, and video essays.
I actually watch YouTube videos of AWS Reinvent all of the time on YouTube and there are no ads.
I pay for tutorials from places like ACloudGuru and PluralSight. Well I get reimbursed for them. But I did pay myself before I started working at my current company.
And this gets back to if you value Youtube enough and don’t want to see ads - pay for YouTube premium.
I'm not completely sure what you're getting at with that; none of this is a rebuttle to my point that Youtube is not an optional service. People can't opt out of Youtube without also opting out of a huge part of culture and a huge number of everyday resources, and without severely inconveniencing not only themselves but also the people around them who will reasonably resent them for making that choice.
That's what a network effect is. It punishes people who try to move away from a service by forceably separating them from a shared community and separating them from unrelated services and resources. Understand that Youtube is not primarily a service for hosting videos, it is a middleware that sits between viewers and content producers, and it hosts videos on the side because doing so allows it to control that relationship between creators and viewers.
So it's cool that PluralSight exists, but PluralSight is not a replacement for Youtube. Again, I kind of think you know that, given how confident you were further up the thread about how there was nowhere for a mass exodus from Youtube to go. You're not jumping into conversations about network effects saying that PluralSight is going to take over. You're pointing out (correctly) that there is no alternative to Youtube.
I have to keep saying, I really honestly think you should be able to understand what network effects are, because you seem to be demonstrating an understanding of them elsewhere.
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This also really misses the point of what people are talking about above in regards to why Youtube's business model is problematic. Ads are part of the problem, but another part is privacy, and the other part is predatory market pricing and monopolization. Paying for Youtube premium does nothing to fix privacy issues that most Google critics have; in fact it makes data collection even easier. I did pay for Youtube Premium back in the day, and while I was paying I watched videos signed out with an adblocker and through 3rd-party clients, because that's obviously the more private option even if you want to support Youtube. Paying for Youtube Premium doesn't get rid of the need to block ads/tracking on Youtube.
It also does nothing to address concerns with Youtube as an advertising business. Paying for Youtube Premium does nothing to opt you out of the advertising economy even within Google properties, and it does nothing to encourage the company away from advertising as a business model. That data will still be harvested and used to show you ads in every other place where Google can show them to you.
Nor does it do anything to strengthen artist support networks off of Youtube, as opposed to paying for content directly and donating directly to artists (which I heavily encourage). Youtube Premium increases artist dependencies on Youtube as the primary funding source for content. This is (imo) an obviously negative outcome for pretty much everyone, there are very few artists and content producers who are happy with the direction that Youtube's algorithms are going and with the hoops they're forced to jump through to keep those algorithms happy. Creator moral on Youtube is pretty low right now, and it might be helpful to start supporting those artists more directly so they don't feel like Google owns their entire livelihood.
"If you value YouTube enough" misses the point that I don't value Youtube. I don't want to support Youtube, I resent that I'm forced to use Youtube, if it was possible for me to drop the service without the punishment of the network effects I'd do it in an instant. The only reason I use Youtube at all is because I don't have a choice. And I'd be happy to see the product fail and for a better general video hosting market to emerge from its corpse, I think that would be a great outcome for everyone including artists/makers.
Not disagreeing with anything you said, just decorating: for myself, I think paying for Premium or watching ads is a perfectly valid set of choices, with all the other things you have clearly delineated removed from the equation. Had people been offered the pay option from the get go, arguably some of the nastier expressions of Bridge Troll Capitalism might never have come to fruition.
To deliver content that requires bandwidth beyond dialup, it's gonna take some resources; one way or another, those resources must be paid for, and children aside, I am not aware of many people who actually think they deserve anything completely gratis; at this point we all need to be on the same page that it must be paid for, one way or another.
If we could get absolutely everyone to agree to that proposition and use that as the starting point for further discussion, I'm pretty sure we could come up with a lot of creative ways to make that happen without literally going full 1984. Really does feel like I'm living out the Tower Of Babel parable in real life some days.
> And where are people going to go to host their videos for free at scale?
given that YT has been doing it since 2005, I think it's safe to say that there isn't any technological or copyright 'moat' aside from just sheer scale; I would presume if YT decided to alienate their entire userbase that some 'threads'-like overnight competitor would get spun up to suck the leavers up.
I don't think that it's reasonable to assume that there will be some kind of multi-media vacuum formed in the absence of YT. there is a lot of good will to manipulate away from YT should their decision-making process get excessively heavy handed, and I think someone with money or power would jump at the chance to do so.
Perhaps scale is actually a non-problem in many cases, and only a critical one in a paradigm where there is a need to have as much traffic as possible on a site for profit reasons.
A person who wants a place to talk about their cat doesn't actually need a global scale video platform, unless their cat organically goes viral and the site gets hugged to death. Most cat posters just need a given amount of heart emojis per post, that a rather small group of cat fanciers can actually manage without much problem. Similar dynamics apply to the vast majority of internet content.
There might be a place for a big video platform in the post-free-money internet, where creators of (again, organically) viral content can shift network loads for a share of ad revenue or a modest fee. So while your dog is clearly bad mannered and mediocre, my dog is a goddam supermodel and he knows it and he's gonna be a star if I ever put a picture of him up. He would need YouTube for sure.
My little songs and rants, nobody outside of a few friends and sidewalk passerby are ever gonna hear them and that's fine, so peertube is gonna do the job for me just fine.
I think that one requires a certain kind of exposure-seeking, or else profit-seeking mindset in order to see what YouTube does as crucial. That's my take anyways.
I think we keep thinking of like “What’s exactly like YouTube?” vs “What is an alternative video-format hosting platform?”
The way we consume video format content keeps changing. If YouTube ends up losing people, then it doesn’t mean the think that takes its place needs to be the exact style of video content.
The younger desire demographic doesn’t want to be on the same platform as their grandmother.
Do you really want to depend on video platform that may not be around? Serving video costs a lot and investors don’t have the appetite to poor money into startups like they did even two years ago.
YouTube should just stop pretending to be a free video host at this point & instead put everything behind a paywall. So much for the free service until we unicorn with VC/public money.
Would be neat if they terminate Google accounts altogether to actually piss people off
