I want creators to get paid when I watch them but I also don’t want ads. YT Premium is affordable (it costs less than $4 a month for me) for me and I also get YT Music with it. I watch hundreds of hours worth of video from multiple creators so it’s a fair deal.
And you realize that YouTube will do everything in their hands to stop you from using these apps in the future right? That was kinda the point of the article.
Making people pay (with their time and attention) while they are already paying for subscription will not encourage more people to buy premium.
That’s way too expensive and I can’t afford it. YTP is less than $4 a month so at least the creators gets at least a few cents from my views, and I watch a lot of creators.
I’ll gladly pay for a service that doesn’t thrive on pushing propaganda down people’s throats to maximize watch time and that isn’t actively trying to make my user experience miserable by removing downvotes, forcing shorts and so on.
I’d rather pay someone to kick me in the nuts. Sounds like a better deal tbh.
And that’s how things die due to no revenue. Running YouTube is expensive af and the more people who used things like revanced, the worse things will become for everyone else.
It’s funny how you put all the blame on the users and none on the people that run the site. They fail to pay creators properly, fail to protect them from copyright claim abuse, and all the while they expect those creators to keep making content to keep their site relevant. It’s going to come crashing down eventually.
Also, in matters of taste the customer is always right. If people are so fed up with ads that they adblock en masse and/or leave, then youtube are the only ones to blame.
My point in my comment was about how YouTube is expensive to run and that the more people who refuse to generate revenue for it (I feel dirty writing that and strongly disagree with it, by my feelings have no effect on reality,) then it has to make shittier and shittier decisions to generate that revenue.
I 100% agree that YouTube should pay their creators more and protect them from bullshit copyright, but that would just compound the issue of the cost of running the site.
What is this entitled attitude everyone has where they believe they should be handed things for free? It completely unsustainable and childish. Corporations do not do things for free, they can’t. They exist solely to generate revenue and if they can’t, they die. I generally hate corporations on principle, but again my feelings don’t change reality.
Nobody is saying they should be handed things for free, we are saying that youtube is doing a bad job and shouldn’t be enabled.
Piracy is not a moral problem, it is a service problem. They are making their service worse with their decisions, and if it’s not sustainable long term then it will die, which I believe is inevitable at this point.
Again, this isn’t about individual behaviour, it is about mass behaviour. None of us can control that. If youtube wants to succeed, they have to navigate the reality that adblocking will happen on their service, and I don’t believe they can do that. It’s not that it would be physically impossible, they just lack the capacity to find a solution because of how they are structured. The problem is that they will not accept a lower bottom line, they have to keep increasing revenue so they are squeezing people, and eventually they will go too far. Once they get just a little bit too close to the sun they will start their death spiral and then they’re done.
Federated networks prove that we don’t need some central overlord to run our networks for us, and once there is a way to own our own video sharing network I would have absolutely no problem giving some money to support it. I’m not going to give money to a big corporation to enable them to keep squeezing us. They don’t make a good service, they make a shitty, awful service that we have to fight them in order to use properly. The only substantial thing they’re doing is server hosting, and we don’t need them to do that. The only real barrier is critical mass of users and creators, and eventually they’re going to push enough people away that that happens.
You’ll care as more and more people have to quit YouTube or make progressively more shit content to appease the algorithm. It also makes it harder and harder for new people to start on YouTube.
Basically everything within capitalism fucks over someone that’s just business as usual 8n out society. Usually to a much worse degree, think the children who likely made your clothes for next to nothing. I’m all for tearing down the system, but there’s not a whole lot as an individual that I can do.
Is pirating stealing? Nothing was taken from YouTube. You could say it’s unauthorized access, or unauthorized duplication of data, but none of that leaves YouTube down any data.
Right. It really pains me to see how many people simply buy into nonsensical corporate propaganda. This is a matter of our freedom and our democracy, and every single day that the mega-corporations are expanding their hold of our information retrieval and processing, we get one step closer to not being able to control what’s happening to us anymore, to tell reality apart from deception, to innovate, to build our own futures. 1984 is such a good piece of literature because it is shocking, but I find it even more shocking that we are accelerating ever more into such a future.
There’s a reason why they are the only ones. It’s very hard to scale a platform to YouTube scale. Like insanely hard and very expensive. The only other players that could take over are Meta and maybe Microsoft. Not sure if they would be any better.
I support the sentiment, but today everything is a service that wants your money, this resource is finite. And when it comes to YouTube, it’s not even about whether you like it or not: YouTube is a monopolist.
if google made youtube premium like $3/month no one would bat an eye and sub. but they're approaching netflix prices and that's just way to much. i rather support the creators directly than throwing money at google who will give the creators crumbs until they demonetize them because google is doing google things. also won't solve the privacy problem that comes with using their native site/apps.
I think part of the problem is that they’re hosting so much more content than Netflix. It really is crazy that it’s free to upload to YouTube to just store all your videos on there. Probably 99.9% of YouTube content does not get enough views to justify the cost of storing it.
All that being said, YouTube premium comes with a bunch of shit nobody wants so surely they could cut that stuff to lower the price (or tiered pricing for people who want it).
Does YouTube pay their content creators properly? No, they have to rely on external partnerships. Does YouTube help their creators solve issues with greedy companies making copyright claims on not their content? No, they close channels because of such claims and strip creators of income they deserve. Does YouTube keep their platform secure to protect its creators? No, hackers managed to get access to the biggest channels on the platform despite YouTube being aware of the issues for months. Does YouTube at least use their knowledge from spying its users to stop bots posting comments? No, bot comments are all over the place. And I could go like that for ages…
The fact is YouTube is a shitty platform and people use it because they have to not because they want to. Because they have a fucking monopoly! People are paying thousands of dollars directly to content creators through platforms like Patreon, because they like the content. But people are not willing to support financially the platform that openly don’t give a fuck about their users and creators (which are the only reason this platform exists) and care only about their shareholders. Because why would they pay to make the rich richer while content creators struggle to earn money for rent!
Google has been shamelessly destroying all their projects the last few years in a desperate fit to make money. They’ve weakened ad blockers on chrome, they’ve altered the search algorithm so random BS is mixed in with regular to drive towards sponsored content, their starting to setup browser level DRM and creating un skipable ads. None of this is for anything more than greed and desperation. They no longer see anything other than money as the end goal and don’t care if their selling a shittier product at a higher price than no one was ever even willing to pay for. F*ck google.
Until its no longer profitable like the hundreds of other BS google tricks you into supporting only to ditch later killedbygoogle.com . Also in what world are you paying under $4 the standard package today is $13.99
No. This is why if a service loses sight of its core value proposition, it dies.
If youtube is actually successful in killing adblocking on their service - which I suppose a server-side timer could actually do - then they will only succeed in killing their relevance, just like so many social media seem to be doing right now.
I pay for services like a debrid and VPN, because they provide me with the services I need. For very few dollars a month I can get 4K streaming from their servers 24/7. That is all hosting should cost. If the fediverse version of youtube, peertube, became mainstream then collectively people should have absolutely no problem maintaining those costs from the users’ side.
Once that happens and mainstream video streaming is part of the fediverse, I think the network effect that governs social media might snowball until eventualy centralised social media is a thing of the past.
Do not pay for youtube, whatever you do. Let them die.
You think too much of the average person. This sort of thing might affect you, but it won’t affect your friend’s 8 year old brother or his parents who just want a convenient way to watch pewdiepie
Social networks don’t succeed or fail on casual viewers alone. Youtube is a video sharing site, not a content producer. If they get so toxic that the content producers start finding alternatives, then the casual viewers won’t all leave right away.
If it gets so bad that big creators, like pewdiepie, have alternatives that grow in relevance and youtube loses its critical market share then it will eventually lose the casual viewers too, especially if those alternatives aren’t up to their eyeballs in ads.
We saw this with digg losing its place to reddit, where they sold out their content to publishers. Content got thinner and worse until the vast majority of users left for reddit.
This may not be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. For reddit it was the API lockdown, for twitter it’s… well I could point to any number of individual decisions but let’s just call them Elon Musk. Facebook hasn’t quite hit that tipping point yet I don’t think.
With youtube I can easily see this being part of a string of decisions to promote publisher content over user content. They’re already selling views which could really sink them in the end.
You do realize the average person watches YouTube on their TV or their phone, with ads? You are not the target audience for Google.
So I fully expect YouTube to kill adblocking at some point and they might lose what? 10% of users? Of which 5% either come back to watch ads or pay the subscription because all the content is on there?
I’m 100% pro adblocker, the internet is a mess without, but it’s stupid to think YouTube wouldn’t cut you off the moment you don’t provide any benefit to their service (For example despite adblocking you might give Superchat money to streamers, or join Streamer memberships).
Audience is only part of the equation, arguably not the largest part. How many content creators use adblock? The big ones already know how completely meaningless ad revenue is because youtube doesn’t pay them enough and they are already aware of how easy it is to block ads. Also they’re more likely to be using youtube on a desktop because they use one to create, and they also are more aware of the alternatives like revanced. A lot of big creators have spoken out over the years in favour of adblocking.
If youtube makes it impossible for creators to use their own platform they’ll leave in droves, and they will have the voice to encourage their audience to follow. Youtube isn’t the main voice on their own site, the creators are.
Another thing this will impact is the ability for creators to collaborate, since they would have to watch others’ ads in order to see their videos.
Once that happens, the audience will naturally follow. That’s how social media sites have failed in the past. They’ve pissed off the power users to the point they finally left, then the content declined, then users followed.
Youtube is making the same mistake all capitalist entities do, of mistreating the people who actually make the product they’re selling. It’s a fundamental contradiction that only leads to decline in the end, it’s just a matter of when. This may not be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, if this isn’t it, then something down the line will be.
Dude, it’s at most 20 bucks a month to get rid of all ads (with YouTube music on top). Any creator who has some following can pay that from pocket change. The big content creators (1M+ subscribers) pull in millions with a mix of ad money and sponsorships. And it would be a business expense on top for them…
Creators are the last person to actually care about YouTube forced ads, it’s their job, they can afford it easily.
The only ones really impacted are power users, people who use adblock right now to watch. Which would also include me. But what do you want to do? There is no other platform, if they block adblockers I either have to watch ads or finally pay them money. I’m not going to leave for another platform because there is none. Twitch is there, sure, but it’s only for livestreams and awful for VODs.
$20/mo would have kept me fed for the better part of a month a couple years ago. Money has almost never not been tight, often to the point of being inhumane.
If they start forcing ads, I'll just do what I used to do when I didn't have home internet and start downloading videos instead. Which is nicer to be able to hold onto anyway. If someone doesn't like me "stealing," they can fucking pay me.
Not sure what kind of shit take that is if you bought a $70 game recently (Baldur’s Gate 3, even I’m waiting for a sale and money is not tight for me), you have cats and probably a Nintendo Switch with Zelda, that’s just what I read on the first page of your profile. So you obviously have money to spend on entertainment, like most adults.
$20 is clearly too much just to get rid of ads (though it also gets you YouTube Music, like Spotify), but I was talking about content creators who can easily afford this. And most people spend hours on YouTube, probably more time than they use Netflix if we’re being honest.
I don’t like Google either, but at some point they need to make money. That’s the simple truth. If everyone used adblockers we’d see a lot more content locked down behind a paywall. It is what it is. Then you either pay or you find some other source of content.
And let’s be real, people pay for entertainment. If I go outside and throw a stone it would probably hit someone with a Netflix/HBO/Disney+/Spotify/Prime or whatever subscription. It’s difficult to find a person who doesn’t have Netflix for example. If Google forces this through YouTube will just be another subscription service (or you get ads). Or they start limiting uploads to save on cost, which would actually kill their platform (as probably 99% of uploaded videos are barely or never watched, around one hour of video per second is getting uploaded right now).
Youtube constantly screws over and underpays the people who create all of the content that makes their site possible whilst also demanding they pay for a service that is worse than what adblockers already offer whilst also running a business that relies solely on critical mass of users rather than any actual value that youtube themselves can uniquely provide. That could never backfire.
demanding they pay for a service that is worse than what adblockers already offer
Or you could say they have tolerated adblockers until now and allowed you to use their service without a paywall. Yes, it sucks, we’re used to blocking ads, but it was like having free lunch.
whilst also running a business that relies solely on critical mass of users rather than any actual value that youtube themselves can uniquely provide
There have been plenty of other platforms who tried to do what YouTube did, they all failed. YouTube provides a massive infrastructure, about one hour of video is getting uploaded to their servers every second. And it must be kept around, so the amount of data only goes up. A total nobody can upload a 100 hours of video and YouTube will gladly accept that and still make those videos available 5 years from now.
To say they don’t provide a relatively unique (or at least very difficult) service is insanity.
I pay a very small fee for debrid and VPN servers that offer exactly the same server capacity with enormous bandwidth and virtually no downtime. Plenty of services exist that can do what Youtube does. Peertube is a fediverse youtube that is based on a P2P model that lessens those burdens significantly, and it will grow with its users.
The thing that makes youtube dominant is the same thing that makes other social media platforms dominant: users and creators.
They are squeezing those users and creators as much as they think they can without completely alienating them and forcing them to find a better alternative. Once they pass the tipping point and an exodus begins, history shows they will only worsen things and accelerate the process.
The thing about the game of “how much closer can I fly to the sun without losing everything?” is that they will inevitably lose. You can moralise all you want, the reality is that they are getting closer and closer to losing every day. When they get there, you can blame whoever you want, it won’t change anything.
I pay a very small fee for debrid and VPN servers that offer exactly the same server capacity with enormous bandwidth and virtually no downtime.
Did you just compare your small private server with YouTube’s infrastructure? Jesus Christ.
Google had already been paying about 2 million a month for bandwidth in 2015 or so.
I work for a larger company as a software developer, even with a billion in gross sales, there is absolutely no chance to provide even a tenth of YouTube’s service. Especially for free (without paywalls). The company would go bust in two years.
I didn’t, I compared globe-spanning networks of servers that serve millions of people every day to youtube. Those two things don’t seem that different to me. They scale with user numbers just fine.
I mean you work for a larger company as a software developer, and you don’t understand the concept of debrids and VPNs? Are you sure you’re not deliberately missing the point of what I’m saying?
VPN has absolutely nothing to do with hosting a video platform, no clue why you even bring it up.
Debrids is just a file download service, isn’t it? But even if it was a video hosting platform, a single server would never be enough. You need at least two (as a fall back). Then you need dynamic scaling for bigger user numbers, which works just fine for CPU and RAM (or even GPU resources), but doesn’t work for storage. So you need extra storage somewhere all servers have access to, but when it comes to videos you’d be paying millions in no time.
So you need your own cheap storage and datacenters around the world. And CDNs on top to serve your content worldwide (otherwise the experience would suck on another continent if your server is too far away).
Look up how Google does it, they have their own data storage centers. And if your video is crappy and you’re a nobody, it probably gets stored in a slower location on-demand. So it also loads slower. But if your video is in high-demand with millions of views it gets pushed into a more accessible location (and gets higher priority for CDNs). It’s not just hosting, there is a massive amount of logic and software behind the stack.
You have demonstrated a complete inability to grasp what a VPN does, what a debrid service does, that they already do the things you’ve mentioned, and you have yet to acknowledge peertube even exists. I brought it up, multiple times, for a reason.
I have to ask at this point, are you curious to understand my position? I don’t see much point in continuing to explain it to you if you’re not.
I am struggling to understand yours. There doesn’t seem to be a coherent idea that you’re driving towards other than to tell me I’m wrong, which isn’t a position as much as an antiposition. If you have a position, I would appreciate you explaining it clearly.
You use a VPN when you either don’t trust your ISP (or the current network connection you are on) or you want to hide who you really are on the internet. Both are absolutely unnecessary when accessing a video hosting platform (you can do this, but you don’t have to). A VPN is also more on the user side of things to connect to a server, the server doesn’t care if you use a VPN.
Debrid just makes accessing files easier as far as I can see. Like you give it a torrent link and it provides you a direct download? That’s nice and all for piracy, but has absolutely nothing to do with a video hosting platform like YouTube. You could use Debrid to download the video file from a host, but we are talking about providing the actual host you store the videos on.
I absolutely do not get the points you are trying to make, do you have an example for an infrastructure like YouTube you could build out of a VPN and Debrid?
Peertube would be an alternative of course, but it obviously has tons of its own issues (mainly resources, it still costs too much to host a large instance and if you try to access one video a million times things would straight up implode). I don’t see a realistic YouTube alternative without investing millions.
I am not saying a VPN or a debrid are necessary, only that they demonstrate the bandwidth and storage capability at scale for low cost, on which peertube could run, which would presumably scale with interest in the platform. It’s not complicated.
I won’t explain any further unless you tell me, specifically, that you are curious to understand what I am saying.
Now listen, Debrid isn’t actually providing any meaningful bandwidth. It’s a third party (fourth party?) service.
What they are doing is simple: For their paying users (no clue what it costs without making an account, $3 a month?) they offer fast direct downloads. But they aren’t even storing the data themselves (besides caching)! They use premium accounts for other file hosters to get around the download throttling. So instead of you being limited to 1 MB/s or less for most downloads Debrid uses their account to download at full speed, then give you the file.
So they are pretty much abusing other hosters by allowing their own users to share a premium account for various file hosting platforms. Which will work so long until these hosters start aggressively blocking accounts that use too much bandwidth.
In addition to that you are paying Debrid money, $4 or something a month? If every YouTube user even paid $1 a month there would be zero need for ads. You are right, bandwidth is relatively cheap, but getting people to pay is difficult. Your suggestion would basically be that YouTube now forces everyone to pay $2 a month or they can’t access the service (or only 480p videos or whatever), which would work! But is far less suitable than charging more for no ads and have only one out of hundred(?) users pay while the rest happily watches ads.
If every user threw in some coins per month we could have services with zero ads. But even a cheap subscription like $1 or $2 is often too much to convert users. The service has to be free, so that out of a million users maybe a few hundred actually pay.
You’re wrong about debrid services, they store everything, I assume you don’t use them.
But I’m afraid I won’t “listen here”. You can’t even pretend to be interested in what I’m saying, apparently, so there’s no point in me continuing to explain.
Obviously I don’t use them, I’m just reading about how they work. And they seem to give you access to other hosters instead of hosting all the files on their own servers, right?
You haven’t explained shit so far, all you did was say again and again “Debrid”, “VPN”!
Which are just services, but you said zero about the infrastructure behind running them (besides mentioning it must be cheap). You could clear this up in a single sentence.
lol this post is nothing more than a tantrum from a leech of a service they’re too cheap to pay for and scrabbling for reasons other than said cheap-ness
you may get likes on the internet for this wholly selfish take but we all know it’s nothing more than that.
I just went to yt’s front page, which I haven’t done in a long while (usually use NewPipe or use a direct link). There is a LOT of garbage on there. I mean, holy crap! It’s not the creators’ fault, I know. The Algorithm decides, and they must appease The Algorithm. Still, though. And, now, this timer bs for the 2% who use adblockers?
Youtubes own data said 2% of their viewers use adblock. This was from their technical reaserch as well as surveys. Ask yourself what is really going on. Ask yourself why lots of small channels are being demonetised and blocked.
“Commercially viable” is the language that has been banded about. If you’re fringe then you wont attain the threshold YT wants to make money off your work.
2% of all viewers are using adblock. This isnt about adblock, this is about data and corporate control of ad revenues. YT has also said ads are coming to premium too, lets not forget.
And then the AI script retaliates by identifying and switching to matching videos on PeerTube, whilst also learning your viewing habits. A premium version offers a subscription which pays third world workers to complete the captcha on your behalf.
Then Google users WEI to kill the extension.
Then someone releases a VPS which runs Chrome and supplies the whole thing by Remote Desktop, with a client side app that integrates the behaviour...
I know you jest, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility for some peer to peer system to exist, similar to bittorrent, which could distribute the load across viewers. Most people have half decent internet these days. This imaginary extension could recognise the YouTube video URL, check it's DHT to see if anyone else has it, and if not it could capture the YouTube video and redistribute it to the next person who looked up the same URL. Stale videos could be deleted after a time.
So, basically torrenting but for YT videos. Pretty interesting on the technology side on how you’d handle unstable seeders, because after all it’s streamed content, which is different from your regular content you’d get.
Now I realized YT videos buffer anyway.
One could even dedicated a set amount of disk space for sole use of downloading videos automatically that server says they should, which could be algorithmically decided whether it’s needed due to high demand (need more seeds) or sort of archiving.
Could be an interesting project, a decentralized youtube “archive”.
I actually don’t have a problem paying for online services. I host my own email, I pay for Kagi search and I do monthly donations to Mozilla and Wikipedia. What I have an issue with is services that start out as advertisement based and then introduce paid plans, because now you still have all these shitty mechanics just for driving up engagement which results in unhealthy incentives for content creators and rabbit holes. I want a service that is for YouTube what Kagi is to Google Search. But perhaps that model is too difficult to monetize, I don’t know.
Nebula is absolutely amazing, but it’s a very specific niche. I don’t think that kind of model could ever work outside of that genre of educational, super high production value content.
Honestly like the idea of nebula but most of the content from my favorite creators is like an hour long meanwhile I only watch something on YouTube if it’s less that 20 minutes
I disagree. I am on the fence about joining nebula, but that’s partially because I know I will binge through my favorite stuff then back on YouTube watching small time content.
I would be more likely to pay a couple bucks a month or like $20 a year to a service specifically for small time creators trying to build up an audience. Or even some 15 year old that wanted to earn some candy or dirt bike money from their claymation videos or whatever.
I spend a lot of time lying in bed thinking about all of the great art, poetry, songs, books, videos, plays, etc. That will never come to be because it’s stuck in someone’s mind and they don’t have the outlet and or incentive to put pencil to paper, turn on that cam, or finally record themselves when they set bow to string and start playing the work they had been creating for the last year.
I’ve been eying Kagi and Orion. How do you find Kagi? I spend so much time fighting with Google SEO if it’s half decent I would switch. I’m just wary that my searching methods wouldn’t work well in Kagi.
Did you find it straightforward to adjust to how Kagi works?
I’m very happy with Kagi. I find the search results to be excellent. It does take a little bit of practice to get back into the habit of writing proper search queries instead of relying on google already having a profile of what you’re likely to want, but once you do its very solid. The features to promote or demote domains is also very useful.
Funny thing is that occasionally I’ll search for something with Kagi and I’ll get no or very few results only to then try google. Google will then show me millions of results but it’s all unrelated, AI generated, SEO trash that’ll just waste my time. I’ll take no results over that any day.
At least in the past, you couldn’t get banned from YouTube: They would instead lock your entire Google account and I personally would not be able to deal with that.
NewPipe, and YouTube Revanced are great apps you can use on mobile. They aren’t attached to any Google account so you can just use them and skip adds all day without getting any account theoretically banned.
For those who continue to use YouTube and adblockers on PC, simply just make a new throwaway Google account. In the case that they aren’t actually bluffing (they are) then at least your temp account will be banned.
Revanced is great because it lets you watch without ads WITH Google account. I know that if you’re focused on privacy the last thing you want is Google account but for me the benefit of YouTube algorithm suggesting me exactly what I want to watch is enough the reason to not use any platform/app that doesn’t support login. Of course they need to try more before I’ll pay for premium. For now if that dialog ever shows up to me I’m setting my UA to Android and see if that happens on mobile YouTube as well. Since they don’t care too much about that version of YouTube it’s possible that dialog will not show up. If that’s blocked too I’m installing waydroid and revanced on it. Also I hope that development of VueTube will speed up because currently it’s so slow I’m not sure if it will ever be finished and it would be great to have alternatives to revanced.
For real. I’m mostly excited for the possibility of getting a viable alternative to Google’s obvious disregard for human decency. Bring on the crowd funded video streaming apps!
[Raises hand] I’ve been paying for a family music plan for years now. YouTube Premium was always just bundled with it. If they ever stopped the bundling I’d hop back over to Spotify.
I pay 6$ using a student discount for YouTube premium because I like watching YouTube on my android TV and I can’t use ad blocker there. In fact I’ve been using it for so long that it actually shocks me when I see someone open YouTube and an ad pops up it feels weird
The worst part of YouTube ads is super long ads (sometimes even multiple hours long). It has happened to me multiple times. And coincidentally it always happens when I’m feeling sleepy.
Seems like a way to check for attention. Not clicking the skip indicates you’re not actually watching. The benefit to them is probably more ad revenue.
Add comment