this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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I would argue that next step YouTube is going to pull is just in time video mixing where they will overlay add on top of your video. This would make adblockers unable to block since it's indistinguishable from regular video. However efforts like SponsorBlock would become dominant way of blocking ads. At which point YouTube will probably resort to preventing skipping video while ads are playing.
At not poing will it occur to them all of that is a waste of time and that there are smarter ways to earn money without gouging people's eyes out. At the moment this is not happening because it's too CPU intensive.
They could use inline commercials.
They could also disable viewing while not logged in, they count the minutes you've watched content vs the minutes of commercials that content was supposed to have and block your account.
Addblocker that runs a second instance in the background that watches the add for each video to make up the time.
I think there's an addon for Twitch that does exactly that. It switches to a different feed when Twitch tries to play an ad, then switches back after it's done.
How can Google make money off of YouTube without ads or Premium?
Just like GMail is bringing them money. Initially it's not obvious but then you realize because of it they dominate the search market and have a service which most people use to lock themselves in. That then extends to Android, etc.
Gmail makes sense as money maker. Running email at the scale they do is really cheap and they can run ads against it.
One YouTube video probably uses as much bandwidth as a month's worth of a typical account's usage.
That's my point, GMail made no sense initially. All the other email services had free tiers with bunch of ads or you could get GMail for free. Everyone wondered how this pays off for Google, but in enough time it becomes obvious.
Google is no stranger to killing their own services. The fact they are not killing YouTube means it holds value even if it's losing money.
Gmail made sense for Google when it was released. No one questioned it as there were already several other players in the market. The only real selling point at that time was Google offering 1 GB of storage for free with ads while other services were offering less. That other services switched to meet Google's number rather quickly was more a sign that Google priced storage per user better at the time while other services had kept their legacy storage allowances.
I think there's no tenable solution unfortunately, but for me personally, as a viewer, I'd be happy to watch a single start video ad if I knew a half decent proportion went to the creator.
But with the way YouTube is to the creators, how unfair and unbalanced they are with copyright, the clear vision that they're not doing things for the people but for corporate (removal of dislike count), I have no guilt continuing to block ads and essentially give the finger to the platform.
Once all the major creators I watch move to a better platform, I'd be rid of YouTube entirely in my life and I hope that's what happens on a major scale.
Plenty of ways. Targeting your most intensive tech crowd is not the way to do it. You want the masses that don't actively try and block their stupid ads. This will eventually bite them in the ass harder then it's currently doing.
So you're saying that YouTube shouldn't want people with adblockers as users of the platform?
No I'm saying, imo, they're wasting a lot of energy on trying to get adblock users to stop using adblockers. Just my take, is all.
Well, people who use adblockers don't make them money and, if enough people do it, revenue tanks.
We already have sponsorblock for that.