Asking genuinely, if you were in charge of YouTube, and you don’t think anyone should pay for YouTube, and you don’t think you should run ads, how exactly would you go about paying for the massive amount of engineers and infrastructure needed to keep the lights on?
I…honestly don’t think you’re particularly honest about this.
Mainly because Youtube red exists and it’s main sell is removing ads, but we already know the answer to that. (Most people don’t actually want to buy the service)
And it’s not like it’s shitty service. It’s Youtube without ads.
yt-dlp A bit of an inconvenience, but if it comes to having to sit through ads to see it on YT, I will download the video to prevent that. I already archive a couple of channels I love.
How much do you really think they would take off of the price tag if you didn’t have music? most similar subs are within the same price range…
I always figured youtube music only existed to make the sub more incentivizing. It probably doesn’t even cost them anything they aren’t already spedning on youtube.
It needs to be about half the price, if not less tbh. At its current price it’s rivaling netlflix, paramount, etc which are full studio’s producing the content, not just hosting it.
Well, if YouTube were truly so terrible that you think it offers no real value, you wouldn’t use it at all. If you yourself don’t use it, that’s all well and good, but if you do still use it anyway but block ads, then you’re admitting that it offers some amount of actual value while refusing to pay for it. In that case, it’s hardly unreasonable for YouTube to decide to not take on the cost of offering the service to those that aren’t going to pay for it. You’d probably be more than a little annoyed if your boss told you that you’ll be working extra hours for free.
There’s nothing inherently valuable to YouTube other than the fact that it’s the default video hosting website because it got there first. You can find other similar websites that provide video hosting that is equivalent, just without the massive audience YouTube has. Keep in mind your argument only works for G rated content because anything that is slightly controversial, even history based content, gets demonetized and there’s an entire other website called patreon that gained popularity because YouTube wasn’t paying its content creators for their work.
YouTube has lots of options for getting people to pay for their content. If they opt to pursue ad revenue they need to accept that a subset of their audience will use 3rd party apps to get around that. Most people don’t have ad blockers so it’s really only people smart enough to download the plugins. To me this is akin to Reddit pissing in the face of their users for the sake of maximizing profits. I get why they’re doing it, but for every trick they employ to get around ad blockers someone will come up with a workaround and I’ll just download that plugin each time.
@BraveSirZaphod this is pretty much what I was going to respond to you with
I understand people need to be paid, I’m just not willing to pay in my time. The paid service is also questionable as well.
I rediscovered this guy very recently, he talks a lot about the same points I’ve been making and I think he does it in a pretty fair way, I’m curious what your thoughts are (anyone feel free to jump in of course)
This is an interesting perspective. Many people are willing to put in time and effort to get around restrictions on adblockers, but not willing to give up time to ads or give up money to avoid ads.
I think if and when adblockers are no longer an option, many who fall in this category would be pushed into the paying category, while others would be pushed into grumpily watching ads.
The minority would go elsewhere to find other entertainment at an acceptable price.
I mean, I’m a happy, paying subscriber to Nebula. Any content where I have a choice to watch it there, I do. It’s stupidly cheap, too. Usually you can find a promo to get it for under $20/yr.
But I am also not pretending that Google owes me free & ad-free YouTube on my terms. They don’t. Nor do the creators owe me uploading their videos to my platform of choice. I’d prefer both these things to be true, but I at least can understand that it is not reasonable. YouTube, frankly, is probably the ONLY killer product I couldn’t do without made by Google, other than some open source software.
People should pirate all they want. I don’t really give a fuck. I don’t consider it some great moral evil. But pirating from YouTube is not some symbolic, ethical stand for your values. If you really think what they’re doing is bad, stop using the service and pressure the YouTubers to upload elsewhere (which they pretty much ALL could do without consequences from Google). The entire platform only exists because of advertising. Period. If you hate ads as much as I do, pay for the ad-free versions.
I think if and when adblockers are no longer an option, many who fall in this category would be pushed into the paying category, while others would be pushed into grumpily watching ads.
Given the success of Netflix’s ban on password sharing, I think you’re right here. Most people really don’t care about this nearly as much as the average tech enthusiast.
But YouTube Premium is incredibly reliable, unlimited, famously has very little content moderation, and is full of enjoyable content? (i.e., all of YouTube)
I don’t believe you do because you would’ve linked to it instead of YouTube. You claim to hate that business, yet you direct people to engage on it.
You’re getting on a moral high horse about how it’s fair and right to pirate from YouTube because of their bad behavior, yet when given a free alternative platform to view the videos from a creator you respect enough to link, you don’t. You go to YouTube.
Let’s give an example:
I think you underestimate how much pirates and the opposition truly hate google and their practices and the lengths they will go to in order to get the content they want.
Apparently not very hard at all, since there was a totally Google-free way to get the content you want that supports the creator even better and is free and yet here you are not using it.
I don’t care what YouTube wants to do or how they do it, they need viewers and if they can’t figure out how to keep em, ah well. They gotta create a service that caters to my behavior, not the other way around.
Well, actually, they have to create a service that caters to people who bring them revenue. If that isn’t you, they don’t have to, and actively shouldn’t, cater to you at all.
You’re just saying “I don’t have an actual answer” in a roundabout way.
Google makes enough money as is, I don’t really care if the make poor decisions and end up with an unviable business model. I’ll do other things with my time.
I don’t really care about Google’s wellbeing. I pay directly to the content creators I like and I hate seeing ads anywhere in my life and I’m willing to put in time and effort to make sure I see as few as possible.
If they say that the marketing data they scrape from user activity isn’t enough for em, well, sucks to suck I guess.
That’s the thing with ads. They’re a thorn in my side. That Google puts there.
If you were charging me to remove the thorns you put in my side, I’d be belligerent towards you. And I ain’t gonna give ya money.
Is YouTube running at a loss, anyway? Or is Google just trying to squeeze more money outta its products? Maybe they should be content with the profits they got. Some quick searching says it generates somewhere in the realm of $29,000,000,000 in revenue annually. I imagine it’s likely they can afford to not be so damn greedy.
We have no idea if YouTube operates at a loss or is profitable. Google won’t say. Revenue really tells you very little when you look at what it takes to run something like YouTube. It’s a huge reason why an open competitor is so hard to make work.
The reason I don’t bring them revenue is because they continue to make the experience worse. Paying isn’t going to make that stop, it’s just going to temporarily shift the bar a little; the bar is however still moving towards a shittier experience for all.
Why would I look at this and go “Yes, I’ll pay!” There are a lot of services I would genuinely pay for if I didn’t have an impending dread that the service is just about to get worse again regardless of if I pay or not. It’s not like paying is a magic bullet, either, it comes with a ton of different issues like privacy. They still sell your soul to advertisers if you pay them.
Ultimately, they have no obligation to provide you something of value for free, and given that you do apparently use YouTube, they are objectively providing you something of value. They’re completely within their rights to not do that.
I’ll gloss over that you either missed my point or ignored it; I don’t use YouTube because it’s too shit, actually.
I don’t pay for any Google services, not that I’m using any with any consistency anymore, for the same reason that I don’t use them anymore. Google cannot be trusted to provide a good service, paying costumer or not. If you punish me for using the free product, why would I ever trust you? Steam doesn’t slap me across the face at every chance it gets when I don’t spend money on their store for a long period of time, yet I have no issue paying for the games I do want to play despite piracy being completely risk-free by comparison.
If you aren’t getting paid for your content, they’d probably be glad to not have to host it anymore. Anyone with content where it’s worth them hosting it is getting paid.
I paid for Lynda.com, and it could have easily taken in more business if YouTube wasn’t working so hard for Google ads. There are a lot of paid (and free) services that suffer because of YouTubes ad-money business model.
Netflix could use the extra business. There are plenty of services failing to thrive while YouTube exists. Peertube would be wide open if YouTube went the way of most of Google’s stable of apps. PeerTube is wide open even if YouTube doesn’t go away anyway.
People genuinely hate ads. It’s a high degree of enshitification. YouTube could divide into paid content and free content in a simple Freemium model.
Or, add third tier with ads, which any user can opt out of in the same way contributers can. I’d be happy to click subscribe on an ad free experience with less content available to me.
Or, add an option for a couple of free tier items per month, week, or day. Like Medium’s business model.
There’s a middleground between reckless profiteering and not making any money at all. And yet YouTube discontinued their $5 tier. But no, it’s the kids who are out of touch.
I’m perfectly fine if commercial platforms like YouTube go out of business. This will create space for smaller platforms run by users as a hobby instead of a business, which I think would lead to a healthier media ecosystem. Additionally, advertising is not a healthy activity for society. Spending resources to manipulate people is not really beneficial to humanity as a whole. If it were up to me, it would be banned.
From a financial standpoint, that doesn’t make any sense though. Why would you continue to run a service that is a net drain on the rest of your business? Unless it can offer some meaningful, tangible benefit to the company, why continue to operate it at all? If a service needs to be subsidized to survive, why does it need to survive?
Google has basically used it to increase their tracking capabilities across the web. They know when you visit any site with an embedded YouTube video. But that’s only possible because they’re already a massive company. And it’s not reasonable to expect them to continue subsidizing it out of the goodness of their hearts. After all, if you’re willing to ask them to subsidize it, why aren’t you willing to help by paying for premium? It’s easy to say “just subsidize it” when it’s not your money.
To be clear, I don’t pay for premium and probably never will. But this thread has a lot of emotionally charged “because I want it” responses, which aren’t really grounded in reality. YouTube has operated at a loss for a decade, and only continued to operate because it had the backing of a tech giant. But if that tech giant wants to stop subsidizing the site and finally make the site profitable, that’s their prerogative. Yes, it’s the final step in the enshittification process. Yes, it means free users will have a worse experience. But ultimately, the company isn’t required to care about the free users.
Not OP, but I personally would like to see a variety of options for how I see ads. Not what ads I see, but how they’re delivered. I imagine several less intrusive options and the option to continue ads as they are now. I would need two or three less intrusive options combined to cover my viewing, or I could take only the current annoying interrupting ads on their own.
On second thought, YouTube would just end up turning on all options and stopping playback for anyone who finds the options list.
by being owned by google? treating users with respect and running graceful and non-invasive ads? (maybe still image banner ads only? ratchet up the tension on the advertiser ghouls, not the end users?) having something akin to a patreon? simply eating the cost because it’s a public service? (not to mention the public service of draining the bank accounts of VC/investor/silicon valley vampires)
Asking genuinely, if you were in charge of YouTube, and you don’t think anyone should pay for YouTube, and you don’t think you should run ads, how exactly would you go about paying for the massive amount of engineers and infrastructure needed to keep the lights on?
For me personally, I would rather pay for a service than with my time via ads.
That said, the services provided these days are unreliable, gatekept, metered and not enjoyable. Why should I pay for shitty service?
Therefore I’m only left with one option and my wellies are strapped tight! 🫡
I…honestly don’t think you’re particularly honest about this.
Mainly because Youtube red exists and it’s main sell is removing ads, but we already know the answer to that. (Most people don’t actually want to buy the service)
And it’s not like it’s shitty service. It’s Youtube without ads.
I don’t need music, I just want ad free YouTube. There isn’t an option for users like me.
yt-dlp A bit of an inconvenience, but if it comes to having to sit through ads to see it on YT, I will download the video to prevent that. I already archive a couple of channels I love.
…?
Just use the ad free youtube…and don’t use the music section?
That’s what I do 90% of the time…
The price reflects including the music service whether you want it or not.
How much do you really think they would take off of the price tag if you didn’t have music? most similar subs are within the same price range…
I always figured youtube music only existed to make the sub more incentivizing. It probably doesn’t even cost them anything they aren’t already spedning on youtube.
It needs to be about half the price, if not less tbh. At its current price it’s rivaling netlflix, paramount, etc which are full studio’s producing the content, not just hosting it.
Well, if YouTube were truly so terrible that you think it offers no real value, you wouldn’t use it at all. If you yourself don’t use it, that’s all well and good, but if you do still use it anyway but block ads, then you’re admitting that it offers some amount of actual value while refusing to pay for it. In that case, it’s hardly unreasonable for YouTube to decide to not take on the cost of offering the service to those that aren’t going to pay for it. You’d probably be more than a little annoyed if your boss told you that you’ll be working extra hours for free.
There’s nothing inherently valuable to YouTube other than the fact that it’s the default video hosting website because it got there first. You can find other similar websites that provide video hosting that is equivalent, just without the massive audience YouTube has. Keep in mind your argument only works for G rated content because anything that is slightly controversial, even history based content, gets demonetized and there’s an entire other website called patreon that gained popularity because YouTube wasn’t paying its content creators for their work.
YouTube has lots of options for getting people to pay for their content. If they opt to pursue ad revenue they need to accept that a subset of their audience will use 3rd party apps to get around that. Most people don’t have ad blockers so it’s really only people smart enough to download the plugins. To me this is akin to Reddit pissing in the face of their users for the sake of maximizing profits. I get why they’re doing it, but for every trick they employ to get around ad blockers someone will come up with a workaround and I’ll just download that plugin each time.
@BraveSirZaphod this is pretty much what I was going to respond to you with
I understand people need to be paid, I’m just not willing to pay in my time. The paid service is also questionable as well.
I rediscovered this guy very recently, he talks a lot about the same points I’ve been making and I think he does it in a pretty fair way, I’m curious what your thoughts are (anyone feel free to jump in of course)
https://youtu.be/4Q3ZXQZZlcE?si=bZLNupgMEnn_uWDS
YouTube is okay. I’ll watch it if it’s free or very cheap. I won’t watch ads for it.
And they may decide in kind that they don’t want to offer a service to you for free.
They’ve already decided that. If they make it too difficult to watch it without ads then I’ll stop watching. No skin off my nose.
patreon
This is an interesting perspective. Many people are willing to put in time and effort to get around restrictions on adblockers, but not willing to give up time to ads or give up money to avoid ads.
I think if and when adblockers are no longer an option, many who fall in this category would be pushed into the paying category, while others would be pushed into grumpily watching ads.
The minority would go elsewhere to find other entertainment at an acceptable price.
I mean, I’m a happy, paying subscriber to Nebula. Any content where I have a choice to watch it there, I do. It’s stupidly cheap, too. Usually you can find a promo to get it for under $20/yr.
But I am also not pretending that Google owes me free & ad-free YouTube on my terms. They don’t. Nor do the creators owe me uploading their videos to my platform of choice. I’d prefer both these things to be true, but I at least can understand that it is not reasonable. YouTube, frankly, is probably the ONLY killer product I couldn’t do without made by Google, other than some open source software.
People should pirate all they want. I don’t really give a fuck. I don’t consider it some great moral evil. But pirating from YouTube is not some symbolic, ethical stand for your values. If you really think what they’re doing is bad, stop using the service and pressure the YouTubers to upload elsewhere (which they pretty much ALL could do without consequences from Google). The entire platform only exists because of advertising. Period. If you hate ads as much as I do, pay for the ad-free versions.
Given the success of Netflix’s ban on password sharing, I think you’re right here. Most people really don’t care about this nearly as much as the average tech enthusiast.
https://infosec.pub/comment/4467335
Sorry I have no idea how to @ people yet, not sure it’s implemented in this app yet
But YouTube Premium is incredibly reliable, unlimited, famously has very little content moderation, and is full of enjoyable content? (i.e., all of YouTube)
I think you just don’t want to pay.
I don’t want to pay what they’re asking no.
if people can get things for free
they’re going to get things for free
Mmm not the whole truth, and that is why they get away with it:
https://youtu.be/4Q3ZXQZZlcE?si=bZLNupgMEnn_uWDS
Netflix does similar things it would seem
What other video platforms does Louis Rossmann upload his stuff to, by the way?
He does, you know. But I notice you aren’t watching him there.
Not sure I use a proxy application to watch YouTube videos
So you could be using and supporting alternate platforms, but YouTube is so valuable to you that you don’t bother.
Who said I don’t? Why can’t I use both?
You’re trying to fabricate a point here, and I just don’t think it fits me
I don’t believe you do because you would’ve linked to it instead of YouTube. You claim to hate that business, yet you direct people to engage on it.
You’re getting on a moral high horse about how it’s fair and right to pirate from YouTube because of their bad behavior, yet when given a free alternative platform to view the videos from a creator you respect enough to link, you don’t. You go to YouTube.
Let’s give an example:
Apparently not very hard at all, since there was a totally Google-free way to get the content you want that supports the creator even better and is free and yet here you are not using it.
Honestly?
Not my monkeys, not my circus.
I don’t care what YouTube wants to do or how they do it, they need viewers and if they can’t figure out how to keep em, ah well. They gotta create a service that caters to my behavior, not the other way around.
That’s a flippant response when you were asked specifically to pretend they were your monkeys.
That’s true!
Well, actually, they have to create a service that caters to people who bring them revenue. If that isn’t you, they don’t have to, and actively shouldn’t, cater to you at all.
You’re just saying “I don’t have an actual answer” in a roundabout way.
Well, I don’t, but it isn’t my problem.
Google makes enough money as is, I don’t really care if the make poor decisions and end up with an unviable business model. I’ll do other things with my time.
I don’t really care about Google’s wellbeing. I pay directly to the content creators I like and I hate seeing ads anywhere in my life and I’m willing to put in time and effort to make sure I see as few as possible.
If they say that the marketing data they scrape from user activity isn’t enough for em, well, sucks to suck I guess.
For someone who doesn’t care and has no viable responses to the questions here, you sure do have a lot to say.
It’s true, I’m very passionate about never viewing any advertisements!
Alternatively, they’ll take steps towards a more viable business model, and you’ll also find other things to do with your time.
You can zap all ads forever with a few minutes and a credit card, if you’re willing.
That’s the thing with ads. They’re a thorn in my side. That Google puts there.
If you were charging me to remove the thorns you put in my side, I’d be belligerent towards you. And I ain’t gonna give ya money.
Is YouTube running at a loss, anyway? Or is Google just trying to squeeze more money outta its products? Maybe they should be content with the profits they got. Some quick searching says it generates somewhere in the realm of $29,000,000,000 in revenue annually. I imagine it’s likely they can afford to not be so damn greedy.
We have no idea if YouTube operates at a loss or is profitable. Google won’t say. Revenue really tells you very little when you look at what it takes to run something like YouTube. It’s a huge reason why an open competitor is so hard to make work.
The reason I don’t bring them revenue is because they continue to make the experience worse. Paying isn’t going to make that stop, it’s just going to temporarily shift the bar a little; the bar is however still moving towards a shittier experience for all.
Why would I look at this and go “Yes, I’ll pay!” There are a lot of services I would genuinely pay for if I didn’t have an impending dread that the service is just about to get worse again regardless of if I pay or not. It’s not like paying is a magic bullet, either, it comes with a ton of different issues like privacy. They still sell your soul to advertisers if you pay them.
Ultimately, they have no obligation to provide you something of value for free, and given that you do apparently use YouTube, they are objectively providing you something of value. They’re completely within their rights to not do that.
I’ll gloss over that you either missed my point or ignored it; I don’t use YouTube because it’s too shit, actually.
I don’t pay for any Google services, not that I’m using any with any consistency anymore, for the same reason that I don’t use them anymore. Google cannot be trusted to provide a good service, paying costumer or not. If you punish me for using the free product, why would I ever trust you? Steam doesn’t slap me across the face at every chance it gets when I don’t spend money on their store for a long period of time, yet I have no issue paying for the games I do want to play despite piracy being completely risk-free by comparison.
That goes both ways. I can stop providing youtube with free content.
If you aren’t getting paid for your content, they’d probably be glad to not have to host it anymore. Anyone with content where it’s worth them hosting it is getting paid.
I paid for Lynda.com, and it could have easily taken in more business if YouTube wasn’t working so hard for Google ads. There are a lot of paid (and free) services that suffer because of YouTubes ad-money business model.
Netflix could use the extra business. There are plenty of services failing to thrive while YouTube exists. Peertube would be wide open if YouTube went the way of most of Google’s stable of apps. PeerTube is wide open even if YouTube doesn’t go away anyway.
People genuinely hate ads. It’s a high degree of enshitification. YouTube could divide into paid content and free content in a simple Freemium model.
Or, add third tier with ads, which any user can opt out of in the same way contributers can. I’d be happy to click subscribe on an ad free experience with less content available to me.
Or, add an option for a couple of free tier items per month, week, or day. Like Medium’s business model.
It’s not hard to stop sucking!
well its not my problem
Removed by mod
I don’t mind paying for YouTube content. I do mind their data harvesting, however. Figured out that my life isn’t diminished at all without Youtube.
You think it costs $30b a year to run YouTube?
There’s a middleground between reckless profiteering and not making any money at all. And yet YouTube discontinued their $5 tier. But no, it’s the kids who are out of touch.
I’m perfectly fine if commercial platforms like YouTube go out of business. This will create space for smaller platforms run by users as a hobby instead of a business, which I think would lead to a healthier media ecosystem. Additionally, advertising is not a healthy activity for society. Spending resources to manipulate people is not really beneficial to humanity as a whole. If it were up to me, it would be banned.
Subsidise it with your other services
Why would they? It’s not like it’s going to be bringing customers to their other services and Google isn’t a charity.
They’re not a charity, they’re a monopoly. So fuck them I don’t care how people circumvent their increasingly shitty service
“Just don’t worry about revenue at all” is the best kind of secret genius business strategy that I come to Lemmy for.
From a financial standpoint, that doesn’t make any sense though. Why would you continue to run a service that is a net drain on the rest of your business? Unless it can offer some meaningful, tangible benefit to the company, why continue to operate it at all? If a service needs to be subsidized to survive, why does it need to survive?
Google has basically used it to increase their tracking capabilities across the web. They know when you visit any site with an embedded YouTube video. But that’s only possible because they’re already a massive company. And it’s not reasonable to expect them to continue subsidizing it out of the goodness of their hearts. After all, if you’re willing to ask them to subsidize it, why aren’t you willing to help by paying for premium? It’s easy to say “just subsidize it” when it’s not your money.
To be clear, I don’t pay for premium and probably never will. But this thread has a lot of emotionally charged “because I want it” responses, which aren’t really grounded in reality. YouTube has operated at a loss for a decade, and only continued to operate because it had the backing of a tech giant. But if that tech giant wants to stop subsidizing the site and finally make the site profitable, that’s their prerogative. Yes, it’s the final step in the enshittification process. Yes, it means free users will have a worse experience. But ultimately, the company isn’t required to care about the free users.
If YouTube operates at a loss and they decide to ditch their service its their problem, not mine. I’m not here to save google
Not OP, but I personally would like to see a variety of options for how I see ads. Not what ads I see, but how they’re delivered. I imagine several less intrusive options and the option to continue ads as they are now. I would need two or three less intrusive options combined to cover my viewing, or I could take only the current annoying interrupting ads on their own.
On second thought, YouTube would just end up turning on all options and stopping playback for anyone who finds the options list.
by being owned by google? treating users with respect and running graceful and non-invasive ads? (maybe still image banner ads only? ratchet up the tension on the advertiser ghouls, not the end users?) having something akin to a patreon? simply eating the cost because it’s a public service? (not to mention the public service of draining the bank accounts of VC/investor/silicon valley vampires)