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The old business model could not last forever… and even if it could it was not good for anyone.
Think about it
Hosting videos is expensive, someone has to pay for it. It was mostly paid by ads. Ads which many (most people) would block and many people would not ever click even when not blocked. But it still made money… The money come only from ads which 1) where not blocked 2) where at least clicked. The business relied on that.
So YT relied on ads targeting people who did not know how to block ads and people easy to manipulate by the ads (eager to buy whatever they are trying to sell). Probably not the brightest. Or just easy to be taken advantage of. So the incentive would be to promote content for those people. Not good content, not true content, just content that makes ads viewed and clicked.
People using ad-blocks were still affected by those who do not. And whole site was optimized for advertises not viewers or content creators. And that is bad.
I am all in favour of any direct form of payments instead of ads powering the internet. Sites get very little money for each view anyway – so the prices for users should also be quite small.
Unfortunately as long as ads are supposed to be normal part of internet, they may get forced even onto paying customers. We need regulations.
People were okay with ads, then YouTube started making them obnoxious. Ads every 2 minutes, postroll ads that interfere with autoplay, incredibly long "ads" which mean you need to watch YouTube like a hawk to make sure your 5 minute video hasn't been interrupted by an hour long ad you need to manually skip.
There's a balance that people need to be happy with a service, and if the service doesn't provide that then people will use things like adblockers to get it themselves. It's the same thing that happened with the first "adpocalypse" that brought about most of the big name adblockers in the first place: people were okay with unobtrusive ads, then advertisers started running popups, overlays, autoplay videos, fake system notifications, on and on and on. The advertising became so disruptive people were unable to use sites without adblockers. And so the cycle repeats.
YouTube brought this on themselves.
This is my problem with YouTube’s ads. If it was a 5-15 second video ad at the beginning/between videos, plus a banner ad or ads on the side/page, that could be sufferable. But constantly interrupting videos at random points for long ass ads does not mesh well with a short-video platform.
And I also enjoy reminding people whenever I get the chance that the FBI recommends using an adblocker for security/safety reasons: https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA221221
That's where I'm at as well. For a long time I didn't bother with adblocking on my TVs and a few other devices because I could tolerate 1-2 ads before every video and the occasional mid-roll ad on the longer videos. Then they started ramping things up; it was when I got 10 ads on a 6 minute video, 7 of which were the same ad that I'd finally had enough. I'm not going back, they can get bent.
I wouldn't mind paying a little bit of money every month to get YouTube ad free. However, it costs €12 a month. That's a lot of money if you only care about getting rid of ads. I personally don't need the other features (downloading videos, background play and YouTube music). If they added a 5 to 7 euro a month tier through which you could get rid of ads then that would be much more interesting to me. Now I just feel like I should keep looking for ways around their pop up shenanigans.
That's really expensive, I pay around €7 for the family plan and I live in the EU.
The family plan is $30/mo here.
The family plan sadly isn't an option for me, I don't have anyone in my family that uses YouTube as much as I do so they wouldn't be interested in it.
My buddy put me on his.
lol, every one of these threads has a highly upvoted corporate shill comment.
And it's virtually guaranteed that this comment will be replied to in a paternalistic, condescending manner by a for-real-actual-lemmy-user who is only spouting Google's talking points because they realize how hard and expensive it is to host a video website you guys.
YouTube pays five-year-old "influencers" millions of dollars. Obviously this is because it is losing money which is your fault for using an adblocker. 🙄
I'm not sure the comment calling for regulation is a corporate shill. It's a pretty level-headed look at things imo, because the truth is YT cannot afford to operate for free. We live in a system that just doesn't allow that, for better or worse. Unfortunately, the way we went about funding things on the internet (outside of ridiculous amounts of capital flowing to startups for years, which doesn't really apply to YT/Google) was ads, and they have gotten wildly out of hand. This is on top of an insane amount of data harvesting. We have to face the reality that any major, data-heavy platform like YT is going to need significant revenue.
We need a solution to either lower the cost of (opening things up for individuals to host), or more efficiently fund, services we like if they're going to stick around in the current state of the world. Even if we say "google can eat the cost" we're still putting all our faith in the goodwill of an entity that is designed to do the opposite of what we're asking. That's begging for issues.
Peer-to-peer stuff is the best solution I've seen, or self-hosting. I'm far from an expert, but from what I understand the tech just isnt there yet for it to become the norm. All that data has to go somewhere, and storage is prohibitively expensive at a certain point.
That's what Bittorrent is for.
https://joinpeertube.org/
Also old fag would remember when we also exchanged amateur content on bittorrent, stuff like the Metallica and Britney spears mashup or fun video but capitalists took it off (well, let's be honest it was mostly for piracy and porn)
I'd be in favor of direct payments too if any of the money actually made it to the content creators I watch. As it it most of their videos wind up demonitized so I'm not going to pay youtube just so youtube can pay copyright trolls. If they started pushing back against the people/companies filing false copyright claims then I would be willing to pay. But we all know that won't happen.
Not to mention cases where they demonetize a video/channel and still run ads on it 🙄
Apparently the content isn't advertiser-friendly enough to pay the creators, but it IS advertiser friendly enough to advertise on.
That's something else that pissed me off. I do understand demonitizing from ad income (although in my opinion advertizers should just cope) for "vulgar" content. But it makes no sense for those same videos to lose youtube premium income. If youtube premium users are watching the video then the poster should be making at least that income even if the video cand be advertized on.