Sorry Google.
I’m gonna use YouTube ad free or I won’t use it.
And I ain’t gonna pay for it.
Pretty sure that they are fine with that, they are actively trying to get rid of you.
If that were true they’d have restricted YouTube to logged in people.
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.
…?
Just use the ad free youtube…and don’t use the music section?
That’s what I do 90% of the time…
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.
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.
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)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/4Q3ZXQZZlcE?si=bZLNupgMEnn_uWDS
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
In 2022, Youtube was getting $14 ARPU for free users (from ads) and $120 ARPU for premium users. With premium users contributing so much more to their bottom line, one would think they would strive to keep those users subscribed, but instead YouTube started raising prices and even stopped honoring the grandfathered price points their long term subscribers (like myself) were at. I would have kept paying for my family subscription indefinitely at that price point - which is still several times higher than the revenue they would get from me as an ad-consuming customer - but they opted to not allow that, so they lost all the revenue they’d been getting from me entirely.
Youtube specific stats are hard to find, but Alphabet is one of the most profitable companies worldwide, with a profit of just under $80 billion in 2022, so your question is honestly irrelevant. The status quo would have been more than enough to keep the lights on. This isn’t about making ends meet; it’s about getting as much profit as they can.
Even so, the person you replied to didn’t say YouTube shouldn’t run ads or charge for a subscription. They were talking about themselves and their willingness to watch ads or subscribe.
And because enough people aren’t like that person or like me, YouTube is going to continue to grow their revenue and their user base - for now, at least.
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.
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.
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.
Alternatively, they’ll take steps towards a more viable business model, and you’ll also find other things to do with your time.
I’m willing to put in time and effort to make sure I see as few as possible.
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.
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.
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.
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Oh no, how unfortunate. Sadly, we don’t have alternative YouTube clients like Invidious or Piped that can be used with LibRedirect to automatically redirect all YouTube links to these alternative front-ends. And unfortunately, you can’t use LibreTube or NewPipe on Android, as well as Yattee with this guide on iOS, iPadOS and tvOS or SmartTubeNext on Android TV.
The ads make it pretty bad. They’d have to work really hard to make it worse without ads.
They couldn’t possibly make the experience worse than it already is without an ad blocker.
No adblock = No youtube
The more Google keeps going down this path as they inevitably always would, the more viscerally I will fight against it.
I love how aggressive google is becoming. It drives more and more people into the arms of open source os and firefox
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I remember what the internet was like before we had ad-blockers. I concur with others who have said turning the blocker off would make it even worse. There no fucking way I’m turning off ad-blocking under any conditions. I’d rather just stop using the internet altogether. I can not verbalize how much I hate ads. I stopped watching TV because of ads a long time ago. Never again.
Oh man, I wish I could get a pair of AR-glasses with ad-blocking in real life. No more ads polluting the streets. That would be great.
Pretty sure any AR-glasses from the megacorps will add ads to real life soon enough. Any AR-glasses not from megacorp will be bought out to shut them down. Not like there is functional antitrust.
Yup, that’s bound to happen, which is why I’ve written off actual AR-glasses long ago. Maybe if there’s an OpenSource solution, but seeing how slow Linux phones are coming along, I’m not holding my breath. But I can still dream!
If there’s anything I’ve learned, some open source genius hacker will figure it out, publish an early demo with 99% of features, and then disappear off the face of the planet before they ever make it available.
That is because the technical challenge of making a prototype that is 90% of the way there is not the same as that last 10% and building a business around it. Those are very different skills. So you start needing a team, a business and money. It absolutely can be done, and there companies like Pine64 that do it. I’ve got a small one. Running a business is very hard. Running an open source business is harder as you are going against the grain of that world.
Can’t possibly make it worse than shoving ads from hate groups. On my computer, I use Firefox with adblock, but on my phone and tablet I had been using the YouTube app until a few days ago. Google decided to show me a PragerU ad on mobile, so I decided to switch to Firefox mobile to watch YouTube. And the app either moved or removed the ‘don’t show this ad’ selection.
If you’re using android you might want to check out YouTube ReVanced.
That enshittification may continue until the ad revenue improves.
(aka never)
Ironically, I cannot read the article because I use an ad blocker.
Isn’t it 12ft.io
Oh it’s back. It stopped working cos it broke some TOS or whatever.
Imagine being so cocky that you think pirated YouTube videos can’t be a thing.
You can however, almost certainly correctly, predict that most people are not going to care enough to bother pirating YouTube videos, especially given how many people watch YouTube on phones or smart TVs now.
I have a separate app just to watch YouTube through which lets me subscribe and all the rest without an account and without ads and it was Uber easy to install.
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.
“Let’s hook Americans on consumerism and turn them into animals, then we can surprise pikachu when said animals eat our faces”
🤷🏻♂️ I just work here
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.
I think you’re dramatically overestimating how many people actually care about this, or any tech issue, enough to “truly hate Google”. The vast majority of Android users have never sideloaded an app and don’t even know what that means, while obviously that’s not doable on iPhones at all.
Hey Google, you gotta remember that you won’t get any ad revenue from people who get fed up with your shit and just stop going to YouTube.
