Imagine all the cool stuff we could be doing if we weren’t wasting the time of hundreds of engineers figuring out how to shove ads in people’s faces.
“Line go up” is the animating force of the age, the critical philosophical principal around which our entire society is arranged.
Gives me a fucking headache.
“Line go up” is the animating force of the
agethe rich and powerful, the critical philosophical principal around whichour entire societytheir livesisare arranged.
I choose not to confuse their values as mine or that of my community.
If everyone were a paying subscriber we could actually do all those things. No one wants to be ad supported, including the people at YT. But there are bills to pay.
I’m not terribly sympathetic to arguments about covering costs when it comes to corporations. If they were just looking to cover costs or even just make a reasonable profit, there are all sorts of arrangements we could come up with that would be acceptable to most people.
But they’re not trying to do that. Profit isn’t enough for a corporation. They need to make the most profit. And then after that they somehow need to make more than the most.
So they put in ads. But that’s not enough and oh look there are more places we haven’t put in ads, we should fix that. Oh look, our studies show that if we make the ads more obnoxious in these ways they increase this number by 3%. Oh wait, we have all this info we got from spying on people, why don’t we sell that too? Hey guys, we’ve heard you about the ads. Have we got a solution for you! For a small protection payment subscription fee of $10/month, you can get rid of those pesky ads we know you don’t like! Oooh sorry everyone, the price of the subscription went up again. We promise this is all necessary. Oh by the way, we’re adding ads back into the service. But don’t worry, wait until you hear about our NEW subscription tier! (I don’t think that last one’s happened with YT premium yet, but it’s happened with cable and most of streaming at this point, so I wouldn’t put it past them.)
There’s no way we can have nice things while this is the driving force organizing where our resources go.
I’m not terribly sympathetic to arguments about covering costs when it comes to corporations.
That’s fine. No one needs you to be.
If they were just looking to cover costs or even just make a reasonable profit, there are all sorts of arrangements we could come up with that would be acceptable to most people.
What are those? No, really, this is the crux here. The whole rest of your comment is about growth capitalism generally, and I agree it sucks in many ways. But until you can reasonably provide a working alternative to property ownership, we will continue to have things like rent and lending. Investment is a form of lending. And yes YT shareholders don’t give a shit about anything but more and more and MORE insane profit. Because to succeed, a company has to not only profit but profit above expectation, rewarding the speculative investments others have made in them.
It’s foolish though to think that YT’s management are the source of this desire for profit. It’s their shareholders. YT really want to deliver the best product while making a good living, and their staff are also minor shareholders to some extent.
But your problem is capitalism. And if it took ads on the pause screen to get you to see the issues with growth capitalism, then sheeit you are late to the game and I won’t wait up to hear what your alternative suggestions are going to be. I’ll just point out that you waved your hand at that subject and then moved on like we wouldn’t notice.
I would love to be a subscriber if Google could guarantee that they won’t take my viewing information and then sell it to other advertisers or data brokers, or use that info to push ads on behalf of those brokers in other Google products.
As it stands now, why would I pay with my money AND my data? Google shouldn’t get to double dip.
This is not double dipping, because the value of your data is factored into the subscription cost.
Personally, I don’t care that much if I watch YouTube videos about Game of Throne and then see ads for HBO House of the Dragon in Google search. But that’s me. I don’t have this overinflated concept of how precious my YT watchlist is to me.
An old coworker of mine started a company that was an ad network that paid YOU for your data every month, drawing from the ad revenue they got from using your data. The fact is that your data is not worth very much at all on the open market.
With some exceptions I think all the “BUT MY DATA!” is disingenuous pearl-clutching. Because everyone ITT has a credit card in their wallet right now, and that company has sold their personal information and purchasing habits thousands of times over and they’ve never cared.
But suddenly they have to sit through a YT ad because their ad blocker got killed, and now people suddenly care about their data, and fairness to creators, and capitalism, and privacy!
All those are just ways to legitimize the fact that people lose their minds when they have to wait 15 seconds to get the thing they want for free. They’re ashamed to admit that they are that childish, so they make it about their deep, deep commitment to data integrity.
People need to take a step back from their devices IMO.
They’d have more paying subscribers if they didn’t charge more than Netflix for what amounts to user-generated content that they’re getting for free.
They’re not getting it for free. They pay video creators. And they know that the more they can pay them, the more and better content they will get.
And with any product pricing, there is always a balance between charging less to get more customers, or charging more to get more money per customer.
I’m pretty sure YouTube knows more about how to price their service than any of us.
The ratio of income to bills is way lower on our side than YouTube’s.
We need that money more than they do.
I can point you to some people who need your money more than you do. Are you going to give it to them? Why not?? Doesn’t money flow to those who need it??? Isn’t that how this works???
They get loads in governments tax breaks and they data mine the fuck out of us so fuck them and their ads.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/19/social-media-companies-surveillance-ftc
I’ll continue to block them as long as we can and then move on to something else if we can’t. By paying you are just rewarding this exploitative behavior.
If you simply must pay for something then donate it to a charity instead. These companies do not need your money.
Ads give more profit than subscriptions, since if you would adjust subscription price to match ad income, too less people would buy it at that price.
Source: Netflix and Disney Ad-supported tier analysis.
ah yes all you have to do is spend like 100 USD yearly, ever year, and pay for features you don’t want, just so youtube can maybe stop posting ads.
It’s not a “maybe” for me. I haven’t seen a YT ad in years. That’s Premium.
I’m using lemmy right now and it’s not ad supported and I’m not the product.
It’s always weird to me when people post on lemmy and just assert something that implies lemmy is impossible, bro your using it right now!
LOL I donate to my instance, “bro.” Lemmy costs money. You’re just freeloading for the moment.
