Man y’all really expect high quality, extremely diverse, and robust video streaming platform for free?!
YouTube gotta pay it’s bills somehow. Why y’all ok with paying Netflix/prime/hulu or whatever but not YouTube?!
YouTube don’t owe nobody free services. Get over it.
Awww, poor little YouTube/Google/Alphabet, helpless and basically living on the streets, barely able to make ends meet.
literally laughs my fucking ass off
If it is so dire for the poor conglomerate, it could shutdown YouTube to cut costs.
crickets
That’s what I thought.
Won’t somebody please think of the CEO!? Spare a thought for the investment portfolio!
So they should just provide you a totally free service the costs them money because…? Are they still going to pay creators or do you want everyone to work for free to entertain you?
Petition the government to make a nationally owned and run video sharing site if that’s what you want, don’t be surprised when a capitalist company doesn’t give you everything you want for free
People are generally okay with some ads. It’s the quantity and aggressiveness and propensity for making the content worse by how they inject them into the videos that people don’t like. Yes, their infrastructure costs money to run. But their service is only possible because of the people who make videos for them and the people who watch them. It’s always been a give and take relationship. They’ve just been gradually deciding over the years to take more and more as their monopoly over a certain category of digital media has solidified and people have responded in the way people always do.
They knew what they were getting into when they acquired yt - or at least they should have known. I was a teen when yt started and even I could see how much of a money pit it would be. If G wants to throw wads of cash at it, fine. But I’m not propping up their fiscally-failed project with my own money.
You try to bait others into your poorly-crafted arguments when the core statement is stupid: there is no way yt would or will be profitable, full stop. That’s it. And G waited way, way too long to try and monitize or start a subscription model, and now they have a sea of users who will not pay because ‘it’s always been free’. Through and through G fucked themselves with yt. They only have themselves to blame for the situation they now find themselves in.
Do you work for free yourself? Is it completely unreasonable to expect money in return for your services?
Except Google is double dipping, making money off of your data while charging for the “privilege”. Fuck all that
I have YouTube Premium because I also use YouTube Music, so the subscription fee is worth it for me.
But if you don’t use YouTube Music, it’s far too expensive and tough to justify the cost for YouTube alone.
It’s actually still $25. You, the user footing the bill, isn’t getting 6 people’s worth of entertainment from it.
It’s also $300 a year, plus taxes and fees and whatever else. If you’re actually collecting on those 5 other users, every month, reliably and automatically (unless your time is literally worth nothing), then sure. But financially it’s usually ill-advised to assume that ‘if I can just get X others to do Y for Z time, then the price goes down’. Most fall into this, fail to capitalize on the opportunity, and end up spending equal or more compared to a single-user subscription.
Just be sure that the ‘winner’ in the situation is truly you, and you aren’t being had by the thought of $5.
I am so tired of seeing this argument. I do not care about ads. That is not the problem. The problem is that YouTube thinks it is entitled to suck up every little bit of information about me and everyone within speaking distance of me just because I use their service. Do you want to run ads? Go for it. Do you want to get a little bit of basic information about your audience? Such as State or city? Honestly, that is fine. We need to establish a line, but I am not wholesale against any sort of information coming in. But that is not what they are doing. They give us these opaque TOS’s that allow them to take so much information and even sell it to third parties. It is out of control and we have no sense of what our data is worth or who is getting it. That is not OK.
If you want to do an on air read, I’m not going to skip it. If YouTube to run the occasional ad, I’ll watch it. But I will never, ever take down my VPN and ublock origin. I will never apologize for obfuscating my data a little bit. That is my right, and I will exercise it every time.
There is also one other very simple problem with this argument: you don’t have to run ads and steal all my data in order to make money. There are tons of other revenue models out there.
They also pay content creators, so perhaps you will need to drill into a bit more detail instead of offering a factually inaccurate single-line reply.
They pay some creators a pittance, and can revoke that amount and/or ability at any time, for any reason, even for reasons which are not listed in their terms, are factually inaccurate, or otherwise allows them to fuck the creator. Yt is like the waitstaff in the US, “yeah we pay them” ($3 an hour and the rest has to come from elsewhere to make ends meet).
Call me when you see a 90 second sponsor segment for SquareSpace in your next Netflix show.
The vast majority of content uploaded is never going to make them any money. They get free content but hosting it is incredibly expensive.
The ads are just out of control. Back when it was one, maybe two, ads that were 10-20s long combined, I was willing to sit through it. Now there are almost always multiple ads concurrent, ads in the middle of the video, ads at the end of the video if it plays all thr way through, then ads again before the next video plays.
Bring it back to a single ad at the beginning of the video and give me a variety of ads so it isn’t the same 3 over and over, and I’ll sit and watch it.
That’s the way greed creeps.
You could build a successful service that brought in $1 million a month from happy users treated ethically, but there will always be an insatiable psycopath whispering “if we sold our user data, we could make a extra $100k each month”.
So one ad becomes two. Users are tracked and the information sold. Algorithms are created to make services as addictive as possible, because “one more video” turns into “4 more ads”.
However many apologists may post about poor, destitute Google being unable to feed their children because people aren’t watching enough ads, we’re absolutely correct to oppose that endless creeping.
There is always another sleazy way to manipulate people out of money. Companies need to learn to accept that their tens of millions of dollars profit are enough.
I wouldn’t object to paying if:
- Their pricing was more reasonable
- A fairer cut went to content creators
- They had something that actually qualified as a search function on their site
- They weren’t trying to bully everyone into paying
This. I used to pay for ytp family plan, way back when now. I had to skip a month as money was that tight. When I went to resub, they wanted an extra ~$5 a month, or like 25%, for the same content and features. No advertised changes in revenue sharing amounts.
I just pay creators directly now, via patreon and ko-fi. I don’t care about yt, I care about a few creators. A few have stated that $1 is more than they make from yt per user per month. The revenue split is wild.
I don’t care about ytm. Cut the cost in half and give more to the people that are actually providing content. Right now yt in my eyes is greedy and their additional price hikes solidify that.
I think the price is very fair if you split the family plan with others
Also I think creators get a 55% cut for ad revenue which seems reasonable to me
You’re joking, right? Creators make the whole video, Youtube only has to serve it. Also, not all creators get money from ads, so Youtube gets to STEAL from the little guys.
Difference is those other networks actually make content thats arguably seen as worth paying for. YouTube recycles user content and barely pays those users for it. Yes you can say that they deserve your money for servers and whatnot, but you can’t compare YouTube with those other services you mentioned and expect people to cry big crocodile tears…
They’re not recycling anything though. They’re hosting it. For 90% of therm they’re not even charging the person to host it.
That’s only possible because of ads, because it’s not out of the kindness of their hearts. If there was not just value but negative value in Youtube, they would just shut Youtube down. Yeah, they make a lot more money than they need to maintain youtube. But they’d probably prefer to put that money towards the things actually making them money.
And yeah, it would be nice if some site existed that wasn’t corporate driven, but most of them either have no content, or are just siphoning off of Youtube’s content anyway.
And yes, you can say Youtube’s (users) content, and it virtually makes no difference in the grand scheme of things. Hosting the content is still required to do.
Ads aren’t the only form of revenue for them, and historically, YouTube had been run at a loss for years.
You will never get the sympathy for YouTube that you’re looking for. Not as long as the ads keep being so blatantly offensive and irrelevant, and while they continue to dangle their power over the users and content creators, who ultimately make them what they are.
No one cares about their hosting fees. You’re right that it’s expensive to keep the necessary servers and bandwidth, but you’re wrong that people will care because of the lack of care YouTube has shown. On the other hand, paying for something like HBO Max, for example, is a thousand times more justifiable. Look at the novel content they actually create. They also host that content, but that’s not why people pay.
I think people go to the ends of the earth to block ads that are offensive or irrelevant. Some people block any ad because of the history of offensiveness and irrelevance that ads from the majority of services have been. Ads can be those things for lots of reasons. Too many, too long, too often repeated, actually offensive, annoying, distracting, insulting to your intelligence, conflict of interest, against the grain of the content they infest, just to name a few… But instead of advancing that front, services like YouTube would rather just cram them down your throat, and then block you if you object. Ultimately YouTube needs users. Nothing works without the users. The ads only even make money because of the users…
They should be giving us massages and making our stay as pleasant as possible… instead they are power-tripping because they think we need their bullshit, but we don’t.
I dont use those particular other services to be fair. I do admittedly pay for Nebula, but to my understanding that is supposed to be more creator driven and is quite cheap anyway.
The thing about YouTube adblocking, at least for me, is that I dont think they owe me free and ad free content, or that they should be obligated to offer that for some reason. I fully understand that delivering video the way they do costs some amount of money even if not very much for an individual user, so blocking their monetization scheme means that using their website costs them money. However, I do not like or respect that company, I feel that their engagement algorithms have proven generally harmful to society as a whole by pushing people to more extreme content to improve retention, and I feel that their position as the primary place anyone thinks of to upload or view video not created by large scale studios is non-ideal. As such, when I do end up watching something there (content which, I might add, isnt even something that they create, just stuff independent creators are pretty much forced to upload there to be relevant as they are by far the largest game in town for their niche), I’m not bothered by blocking their ads, because I dont really care about Youtube’s profit margin. If anything, if doing so actually harms them, in some tiny way, that is a bonus in my book.
If Google wasn’t so blatantly malicious in their advertising practices then I would gladly pay for YouTube premium. However, their current business model of “take any and every bit of data on them to sell more product” is morally repugnant. Subsequently, I feel no shame in blocking ads and using invidious to avoid giving them even a cent of revenue.
Yeah, you can tell by the replies how much this forum is filled with entitled children and hipster anarchists.
That and by how anytime Google is mentioned here in literally any context, the top comments are all about how much people hate Google. Could be an article about Google rescuing lost kittens, and people here will make up stories about how Google is doing it for some evil reason and it’s a threat to the internet as we know it.
Anyone who tries to argue with me will be summarily blocked because I don’t have the patience today. Thanks in advance for helping me populate my block list.
