Gotta love this shit. Conservatives/companies: “Let the market decide!” The market: “We are tired of you cramming ads down our throats and fundamentally do not want it and will actively fight you on it.” Companies: “Waaaaaa, they are fighting us.”
If the price was even relatively sane I would be okay with that honestly.
But no, they need to keep driving the price up and up. I have to pay my part so that little Jimmy can host 297 hours of white noise on his account that no one wants to watch.
They simply need to change their tactics a little. It cost you some small sane amount to host your videos there. If your videos don’t g gather watches and make money you should be the one paying for them.
I want to pay about nine bucks a month for a family account it’s just b-f rate content. You can pay less to get actual well rated movies from other services.
Also give me the option not to throw in Google music I don’t give a s*** about Google music.
Weird to see this downvoted. Youtube is actually a good service that also isn’t cheap to run, and it also pays good(?) money to the people producing popular content on the platform so why not pay for using it? Or, you know, live with the ad infestation. Businesses need money to run, and if you don’t pay for the content, then either it’s the ads or eventually the whole platform needs to be shut down.
It is a separate discussion if Premium pricing is appropriate etc. But it’s quite horrifying to see people around the world having been taught into thinking that everything should be “free” even though at the same time everyone is complaining about privacy violation and ads being everywhere all the time.
But it’s quite horrifying to see people around the world having been taught into thinking that everything should be “free”
Maybe the businesses shouldn’t have created the expectation that everything was “free” then.
YouTube used to be 1 skippable ad at the start of the video. Now it’s multiple unskippable ads throughout the video. If the 1 skippable ad wasn’t a viable business model then they shouldn’t have been pretending it was and then changing things later once people have gotten used to the “free” system.
YouTube could easily avoid AdBlockers by simply having ad part of the video itself. Not pulling it from a different server, not hijacking your video player to prevent user controls, just part of the video like any other part of the video and AdBlockers would not be able to detect it. They’re not going to do that though, because then users won’t be forced to watch an ad they have no interest in.
I was checking out Archer for streaming the other day and noticed the episodes were 22 minutes long, which means 8 minutes of commercials in that half-hour TV time slot, or 26.666% of the total time.
That’s why I stopped watching TV in the first place, they’re essentially offering to “pay” you 22 minutes of entertainment for every 8 minutes of ads you’ll watch and that’s just completely not worth it to me. Would you pay $2 to watch an hour-long show? If so, to watch ads instead, you’d pay them 16 minutes of your time, and your labor would be paid at a tad less than 8 dollars an hour in entertainment as currency. If you’d only pay a dollar, halve that.
I play games so that my entire 30 minutes is fun and I’ll pay for it with the money I make at my job rather than paying the TV industry in minutes of my time…the thing I have the least of. It’s this really weird setup that’s just become accepted where they pay us out in entertainment at near minimum-wage rates for time spent trying to program us.
(Archer aside…on shit that ain’t even that entertaining)
Stuff should be free. We live in an age where every one of us could be living a life of comfort and reasonable luxury with a modicum of work. In the meantime those of us who aren’t being showered by the excesses of capitalism are fully entitled to stand in the splashes.
Well I mean stuff always has some costs assigned to it. Even if we are talking about Google or software in general, there are still people needed to create and maintain the software itself for the products, who in part also need to put some food on the table and get a roof above their heads. Then there are the infrastructure costs which are enormous on a global video streaming service like Youtube. Now, I do acknowledge that Google engineers are usually insanely well-paid, but that’s the way life is when you absolutely need the people working for you. Other companies might choose to cut features while searching for cheaper developers but it is what it is. In the end, nothing is free and you always end up paying for services in a way or another. And I’m not sure if I would like to continue on the “free” services path that we saw in the last 15 years.
But it’s quite horrifying to see people around the world having been taught into thinking that everything should be “free” even though at the same time everyone is complaining about privacy violation and ads being everywhere all the time.
That is exactly the issue, but you are placing quite a bit too much of your disapproval on the audience.
Google (and others) have built business models off of data mining because so many people didn’t give a shit for so long about it. They have monetized their users for the entire time they have owned the platform. They have trained their own users to feel like the product was free while using those people for advertising dollars.
People have always hated ads, but you had generations of folks who were born before the internet who mostly just accepted the ads were going to be there, and also have never given a single thought to privacy. That slice of the pie is getting smaller, for various reasons.
Now Google have decided since they can’t reliably exploit enough of their users, it’s time to start charging them directly. They are fighting against their own inertia. It is they who have trained users with “we aren’t asking you for $$, so don’t worry about how we’re paying for all this, trust me bro.”
The modern audience is increasingly made up of people with both the will and capability to set up ad blocking and/or privacy protecting measures. Sorry Google, we aren’t going down quietly.
I have the impression ad block literacy has declined a lot. 10-15 years ago I’ld be surprised if someone of friends, peers, same age group people didn’t have ad blocking. Now… I’m often surprised if they do, because it became less common to “put in the effort” of using ff with ublock.
You are absolutely right! Part of the horribleness is exactly companies like Google who were the ones teaching people that everything should be “free” as in usable without explicit money transaction, and now they are the ones who are (thanks to EU I guess) trying to revert that and make the business model viable through subscription.
So I do get why the problem exists and I feel no empathy for the companies that are to blame for that. But, I do worry that we have a whole generation of people who think that stuff should just exist and have no monetary value like it just materialized out of thin air without anyone working on it before and neither having to keep it running. That is not a healthy mental model and it will contribute to predatory companies being able to harvest data out of these people in the future meanwhile privacy-first companies can’t get them as customers because they have to actually ask for money for their services.
But, I do worry that we have a whole generation of people who think that stuff should just exist and have no monetary value like it just materialized out of thin air without anyone working on it before and neither having to keep it running. That is not a healthy mental model and it will contribute to predatory companies being able to harvest data out of these people in the future
I see where you are coming from there, and I don’t disagree with your opinion, but I do still think that while that may objectively be a mindset that is potentially harmful, I feel the net impact in this context is more likely to be increased contribution to and support of things that really are Free (gratis and libre), nudging reality closer to a place where a lot of those sorts of services are free or donation-supported, and less likely to be in corporate hands unless those corporations improve their behavior.
A hard to summarize version of that sort of path and mindset is what initially pushed me away from Windows, but over more than a decade I’ve developed lots more reasons than cost for why I’d never go back, and for why I’ve become a Free Software enthusiast and advocate.
They are still using it and costing YouTube money in aggregate
The poor company only making $31.5 Billion a year has to eat the streaming cost for someone using as ad blocker? Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the billionaires?!
It’s not about wanting everything for free, it’s about billionaires asking for more all the time. I can’t find any information about the costs of running YouTube, but it’s definitely making a profit. It’s making over 30 billion in ad revenue and 15 billion from subscriptions. And somehow that’s not enough and they need more.
I don’t understand why people feel the need to defend billionaires and their corporations out of all the things to spend your time on…
Same way I used to pay for YouTube and currently pay for Podcasts: A small number of ads, at a designated spot, that I can skip through if I don’t want to watch.
It would be trivial for youtube to stop adblockers by making the ads indistinguishable from the rest of the stream: Coming from the same source and behaving like the rest of the video (your controls don’t get locked). But that doesn’t grow their every increasing hoard of wealth fast enough. The product must be made worse for profits to grow more, and according to you I should be thanking them for decreasing the quality of their product for me. $30 billion is not enough! The company demands infinite growth in a closed system! (Or as biologists call it: cancer)
Stfu, I’m subbed. But as soon as I get an ad or a price hike, I’m out. And I’m not gonna blame anyone that can’t or won’t pay. Especially when there’s ads every 2 minutes. That shit is abusive. Defending it is fucking disgusting. Can’t think of anything in this world that’s a bigger waste of time…like… literally you could do anything else and it’d be more worthwhile.
LOL what are you talking about? The users had a hissy fit but after that Reddit got everything they wanted. The users mostly all returned a few days later and it was business as usual. Since then they opened up about selling user data and IPO’d and still nothing.
It’s become abundantly clear now that there’s level of abuse these users won’t endure.
That’s likely what they want. If you’re not viewing their ads and your third-party app is even blocking all the tracking, then you are not providing any value to them to keep you as a ‘customer’. All it does is reduce their hosting and serving costs when you’re blocked or when you eventually stop using it.
Thing is you also stop sharing and commenting and engaging with other users. If it wasn’t useful they would pull the plug long ago, nothing technical is preventing them.
Honestly, huge shout out to the wave of enshittification crashing through Google and reddit and forcing me off their platforms. Decade-long debilitating addiction solved.
Fuck them. I’d rather donate quadruple the money for premium to my favourite creators directly than give a single penny to this parasitic mega corporation.
The issue is not only the ads, it’s the stupid shit it throws you to keep you hooked, it’s the stupid shorts that literally no one asked for, it’s every stupid little thing that fights for your attention. Basically the app doesn’t work for you, it works against you. That’s not the case with third party apps, they have you, the user, in mind, not their profits.
Some of the youtube channels I watch also have channels on Peertube instances or on Odysee. Both options allow me to follow using RSS. I prefer my views to go to these platforms, so hopefully more content creators see these as viable hosts for their videos.
Peertube is also federated, so you can follow channels from your Mastodon account (and I think Lemmy too). You could also spin up your own instance if you like too.
I assume you help and financially support your instance of choice to help them with server costs? Video platforms are much more expensive to host than text platforms like mastodon or lemmy.
Nebula is really good. I just bought a lifetime sub. Expensive but pays itself back in only a few years. Plus the creators there run it as a coop that has a takeover poison pill of some kind.
@rbos@EverlastongOS that's the only thing I don't understand. If it's lifetime sub, how do they fund their costs from your usage after?
Host providers don't have a one-time payment lifetime subscription for bandwidth usage. Eventually you will surpass the bandwidth cost of your lifetime sub and they'd be losing money keeping you. Something doesn't feel right.
There are some ski lifts that give lifetime passes. Its used as a cash injection to fund investments rather than lending off an institution that will want their money back.
Sure you’ll want your lifetime video data for free, but I bet there are a bunch of lifetime members that don’t watch much over a lifetime and/or the risk of future video watching outweighs the loan interest they’d have to pay otherwise.
@b_n
For me, it boils down to this: relying solely on cash injections to scale up seems short-sighted. Bandwidth costs are often underestimated, especially for high-quality video streaming. If users' lifetime costs outweigh bandwidth expenses, the injection could turn into a liability. I'm concerned about the sustainability of their model. Unlike a ski-lift company that generates revenue from various sources (food, merch, rentals).
Maybe my hosting knowledge is just too old school.
That’s just the case. Not everyone buys lifetime subscriptions. This is a short term cash injection for investment. I don’t know their books, but I doubt the majority of their long term income will come from these lifetime subs.
It can work out financially - I don’t know how they do it specifically, but suppose they put all the lifetime subs into one investment pool and used the interest on that to fund operations.
$300 can generate $20 per year for them. So I benefit by only having to pay once, and they benefit by getting a chunk up front instead of having it drip out over time.
Up front cash can also mean the ability to invest in larger things. They can put it into infra budget instead of ops budget.
@rbos yea, that sounds similar to what a lot of these monopolistic internet companies do. But eventually the bill is due.
If they can't scale up with what they got, then maybe it isn't profitable. But what I'm understanding is that they're using "Lifetime Users" as a gamble to grow.
hmmm.. maybe I just don't like private infrastructure, but I'm at odds with this model. But if the users understand that the bubble can burst, then I wish them luck.
I personally have no problem with paying for a service. However, if I buy premium to remove the ads, YT has no longer the need to collect my data. But it is Google and they won’t stop collecting. That, plus the fact that Google basically has a monopoly with youtube are the reasons I don’t buy premium.
Yup. At the end of the day, YouTube provides two resources: entertainment and information. Given that I'm willing to drop any particular creator or show, which I am, entertainment can always be found elsewhere. Worst case, I suffer a little bit of FOMO. And information in the internet ecosystem is like water in nature; it finds a way to keep flowing around
The problem with YouTube Premium is the pricing tiers are completely out of touch with what people are willing to pay and what services they’re willing to pay for.
Let me compare to Discovery+. For $9 a month, loads of shows that ran on TV for decades can be streamed at 1080p (or whatever resolution they were available in), on up to four devices at the same time. They still have some original shows that they spend money to make. This service does not have ads.
Let’s also compare to Nebula, which like Discovery+ also has original content funded by the platform. Every content creator there is also an invited owner of the platform, so their cost structure is a bit different, but they still have to sustain the costs of running a streaming platform while compensating the creators of said content for views. Nebula is a microscopic $5 a month per user with no ads.
YouTube is a platform with entirely user-generated content (costs YT nothing except bandwidth) that is already supported at the free tier with a gratuitous amount of ads. This service has been available completely free with ad support for nearly two decades. The lowest “premium” tier they offer is $14 a month for one person to stream ad-free, at a better 1080p bitrate, be able to download videos or watch them in the background in the official app, pay creators for every view, and have a music streaming app thrown in for good measure. The only other tier is all the same stuff in a $22 monthly family plan for six users, but they all have to be in the same “household” or you’re technically breaking TOS, so in practice it’s often more like $22 for three people, and heaven forbid any of you travel for work.
Two of the “premium” features should be free anyway. You can’t watch a video without downloading it at least once, so the bandwidth cost is the same. If you download it and play it more than once, that actually saves YouTube bandwidth, and therefore cost. Any video that’s played more than once is probably going to be played a lot more than once, so this would add up, especially if the app downloads the ad spots ahead of time. Background play doesn’t cost them any bandwidth at all and is a trivial feature to implement, so it’s put behind a paywall as an artificial restriction for no other reason than to annoy users for not paying. Both of these are anti-features; to charge for them is anti-consumer. They engender spite in users, making them less willing to pay for Premium and more determined to find alternatives.
Instead of trying to figure out what people are actually willing to pay for, which is the expected behavior of a market actor, Google continues to behave like a monopoly that can dictate terms to its users. This is why people refuse to pay for Premium. If they made the anti-features free, and introduced a Premium tier that is $7 a month to one user for nothing more than better bitrate streaming with no ads, people would sign up in droves. There could be a $9 tier for streaming boxes like Roku or Chromecast that offers Premium service for any account viewed from that one specific device, without having to sign up each individual account for premium, which satisfies another niche. The $14 tier could remain for those who also want music streaming (an extra $7 is still much cheaper than Spotify premium), and the $22 tier could still be a significant value proposition for actual families.
It’s not that the price offered for the $14 premium plan isn’t reasonable for what it offers - the issue is that what it offers doesn’t match the actual needs of many people who use adblockers or third-party clients, on top of insulting users with anti-features. Until YouTube management can be made to understand this, they will continue to screech impotently about ad-blockers while driving users away and leaving potential revenue on the table.
Ofcourse you always get youtube music with the subscription, which they claim ads extra value. But I dont want youtube music, I already pay for another service. So for me it would be a waste of money
Youtube isn’t some one of a kind miracle. There’s at least a dozen already-established streaming platforms that would take its place. There are thousands of websites that have no problems hosting gigs and gigs of porn, so it’s not as difficult as people think.
It’s currently my preferred YouTube alternative. Granted it obviously doesn’t have as much content as YouTube. But several well known content creators post to both YouTube and Odysee now.
Some of the ones I follow include: Louis Rossman, Anton Petrov, SomeOrdinaryGamers, and Zach Star Himself. Just to name a few.
And there’s also a browser extension called “Watch on Odysee” which adds a button to the YouTube video if the video is also found on Odysee so you can “watch on Odysee” instead of YouTube. Which can help you locate your favorite youtubers on the platform and let you follow them.
And there is also an Odysee mobile app if you like watching videos on mobile.
It kind of is. YouTube has decades of history. Unfathomable amounts of video. No indie platform will ever come close to hosting more than a fraction of a percent of YouTube’s library and be as accessible and as fast. It would cost an unbelievable amount of money in servers and maintenance let alone moderation. The problem is this is a service, like many others that exist today, that does not bring in more money than it costs. YouTube exists because it’s a branch on a megacorporation tree, but even Google will eventually need to find a way to make it profitable. It is impossible to fund this for free or anywhere close to free.
If the modern internet teaches us anything, its that everything is ephemeral even when you stringently catalogue every last byte of data. People just dont need access to 90% of YouTube’s library, yet Youtube has to pay big money to make 100% of that library available 24/7 365.
There’s already rips at the seams of these systems. Time is not on the side of YouTube.
No indie platform will ever come close to hosting more than a fraction of a percent of YouTube’s library and be as accessible and as fast.
The number of times I’ve heard “XYZ will never happen” in the area of tech from one person or another over the decades (or made the mistake of thinking so myself) is high.
Youtube will either become reasonable in their practices again (which could include a pricing adjustment for ad-free access), or will be replaced as the de facto video service. It may not happen in the short timespan we’d all like to see, but it will happen.
History would suggest that, but I’m starting to believe we’re in a tech service bubble that’s ready to pop. I touched on this in my comment, but it’s becoming clearer than ever that the vast majority of the services we use today are not sustainable on a number of levels. Economically, they’re all a mess.
Food delivery services are bleeding money constantly in the hopes that one day they’ll find a way to profit. They won’t. It’s an insane business model. The actual cost of the service is many times the price of the food you’re buying. Uber/Lyft already isn’t keeping prices low enough to be a cheap option anymore because they’ve coasted too long on VC funding and it’s time for them to start making money. But they still aren’t and if they charged what it actually costs to operate, no one would use it. Many online platforms can’t sustain themselves despite being major social media hubs. Streaming services spend more on buying up movies, shows, IP rights, and other streaming services than their subscriptions bring in.
The endgame of all this means everything will become unaffordably expensive for almost everyone, the services utterly nosedive in quality as companies cut costs and fire staff, or they go bankrupt and collapse. I think we’ve already had it as good as it’s gonna get and we’re going to go through a period of corporations slowly pulling back everything they’ve pushed into our lives with investor funding over the past decade. It’s not just Lemmy’s favorite buzzword “enshitification.” I think a lot of what we expect from the Internet is not sustainable and it’s not going to stick around in any form we would want.
The endgame of all this means everything will become unaffordably expensive for almost everyone, the services utterly nosedive in quality as companies cut costs and fire staff, or they go bankrupt and collapse.
While you’ve got some reasonable points, I’m about 14 years into using exclusively the OS everyone tried to tell me would never be viable on the desktop as my only desktop OS, and have been able to find opportunities to deploy it in my day job also. Haven’t used Windows except when paid to in all that time.
And we’re conversing here on Lemmy, which may be objectively “worse” than Reddit by some metrics, but not any metrics that matter to me, nor, I think, to the majority of its users.
When I’m done typing this I’m going to fire up my Jellyfin client to connect to my free and open source Jellyfin media server, and watch some content on that system which does everything I’d ever hoped a media server would do, even though I was confidently told by many people when it first forked from Emby (after Emby was enshittified) that it would be dead in two years, and certainly could never begin to compete with Plex. (I have never missed Plex for a single minute since moving to Jellyfin)
Those are just three recent examples that I could think of without much effort. As you may be thinking, all of them are far smaller in scale than youtube, and yet, all three of them are things that quite happily serve my needs without spying on me or requiring exorbitant fees to feed someone else’s greed. I can (and do) support them financially, and in other ways, because I choose to.
I’m not listing more examples because I’m too lazy to, not because lots more don’t exist.
More broadly, I grew up during the time when very nearly everything regarding using a personal computer really was controlled by corporations, and was exorbitantly expensive. I had a computer because I was privileged enough to have parents who could buy me one, but the only free or inexpensive things to do with it were: Piracy (via locally copying each others’ games in most cases), Bulletin Board Systems, and learning to program. Shareware and Freeware existed, but with some notable exceptions tended to be not so good for various reasons, and the selection was not especially broad.
There was no free/cheap equivalent like the Raspberry Pi to play with, but if you really wanted to pinch pennies you could build a PC with a kit from Heathkit or Radio Shack, for a fee that was still out of reach for a great many people due to cost or skill. There was not a global internet where people could collaborate and teach each other, and to whatever degree things like BBSs and Quantumlink (which eventually became AOL) might have been capable of providing those sorts of interpersonal connections, the critical mass wasn’t there in a way that it is today.
We have Linux. We have cheap and/or open hardware. We have a vast trove of Free (not just gratis: libre) software that anyone in the world can use to run on that hardware, and improve on their own without penalty. We can share knowledge with others at a rate unheard of for most individuals decades ago. We have numerous examples of users who keep such services and products going, and thriving, without needing to siphon money out of the public as fast as possible to appease shareholder value.
I predict that any such collapse as you describe will be transient, and it will pass far more quickly than it would have in the past. We (gesturing broadly) have the technology, the capability, and (I think) the desire to move past reliance on many of these services and corporate-controlled environments, and various individuals are already doing so. What emerges on the other side after such a paradigm shift as you predict won’t be Youtube, but that won’t mean it’s a step backwards, either.
we’re going to go through a period of corporations slowly pulling back everything they’ve pushed into our lives with investor funding over the past decade
I’m not convinced that’s a bad thing overall.
It’s not just Lemmy’s favorite buzzword “enshitification.”
Enshittification is a concept that has a little bit more depth than just being Lemmy’s favorite buzzword.
I understand where you’re coming from. I’m not personally a Linux user despite a lot of what I value overlapping with the Linux community broadly. I do think much of the technology we use today can and should be replaced by open source alternatives and I’m optimistic about growing interest globally in that regard. I’m not at all suggesting we submit to the new corporate-controlled Internet or go back to a pre-2000s lifestyle.
But I think we’re talking about different things, so let me just bring it back to YouTube. A lot of what we can do is limited by inescapable expenses: server costs and labor. We can say labor is optional because a lot of open source projects are developed and maintained by volunteers. But people do need money to live, so this project becomes the side gig, not the full time job. YouTube’s already a mess with moderation. Imagine a video platform with no full time staff to review illegal uploaded content, DMCA requests, comments, etc. But the bigger issue is the scale of YouTube, trying to make billions of videos play seamlessly at all times all over the world and just work. I can’t fathom the infrastructure needed for that. It would cost far more than it would make in donations if that was all it was accepting. No ads means the budget is that much smaller. If the small percentage of users with YouTube Premium doesn’t bring in enough to keep things running, the open source version wouldn’t either. And fewer people would be willing to pay for it.
This is what I mean by services that are unsustainable. Yes, clearly the technology makes it possible. But there is a cost to it and I think we’re entering a time when we don’t get those things for free anymore.
I think the primary difference in our views is that I don’t think Youtube needs to be replaced by something like it to be replaced. I don’t claim to have a viable approach in mind, but I’m certain one exists.
I would love a federated network of video platforms as long as they can all be searched collectively. Would be great if videos could even be migrated to other instances if storage becomes too limited on one of them. Yeah, it probably isn’t ideal that YouTube is all one platform, but it certainly makes it easy to find what you’re looking for most of the time.
Video hosting is still rather expensive, live streaming even more. Not sure that even youtube is profitable. Until some new tech comes along I think only amazon would be able to support some kind of viable alternative - and not sure they will be much better.
why would you NOT get youtube premium? it’s $22 for 6 users and you get music and ad-free youtube it’s honestly the best streaming service
i do think that channel subscriptions should include ad free watching for that channel, similar to twitch subs. so if people want to subscribe to just one channel they can get ad free viewing for that channel
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