It’s like they think the only way to make money is to drown us in ads based off the telemetry they scoop up and we’re entitled brats for wanting to have a say in how our data is harvested/used against us.
That’s their business model. Drowning us in ads is literally how they make money. They aren’t a tech company. They’re an ad aggregation company. They collect data via having users use freemium services. They use that data to create anonymized profiles of millions or billions of people. They break those profiles down into subsets. And then they let ad companies buy the ability for Google to target those users with ads based on things they’re likely to buy based on the data that Google has collected. It’s a much more effective way of marketing ads than just playing ad spots on tv or on radio. Better than billboards and magazine spreads etc. That’s literally what Google (and Apple, and Amazon even) do. It’s what Facebook does. It’s what most social media does. Their tech? Just a way to get you to buy into an ecosystem so you continue to feed the profile and the algorithm and see the ads.
I’m sorry but with all do respect I do not need you to lecture me about how big data dovetails with digital marketing or the B2B side of it for google, thanks.
You don’t like the fact that they make money by showing you ads? Take your business somewhere else. You’re the one who agreed to the terms of service.
At the point where you’re using an adblocker I’d say you’re capable of researching other means to avoid ads on any platform where you don’t want them, paid or free. There’s work-arounds for this problem. Multiple of them. Including using another extension to play just the video in a frame by itself where the adblocker still works, using piped or revanced or any of the other services that offer YouTube experiences without ads (floatplane, grayjay etc), or paying for the service.
As it stands the posts I see about solutions get basically no interaction while rage posts like this get thousands of comments and upvotes and bring with them a bunch of random misinformation. I feel like there’s just too many of these posts full stop.
I mean, no matter what, you do have a say. You can just not use YouTube. Pretty easy, actually.
That won’t prevent Google from scraping my data from every other website I use.
There’s a paid service though.
Like I get the sentiment, and I use YouTube with uBlock Origin to avoid paying, but if you’re not willing to pay and you’re not willing to watch ads what are you proposing?
This is a distinction that some defenders miss. A lot of people who use ad-blockers would be fine with ads if they were restrained and not too obtrusive. But the amount and frequency of ads only seem to increase. Something that would be difficult to justify, because time does not suffer inflation.
We went from 1 skippable 5 second ad per video to multiple ads every 10 minutes or so, sometimes even unskippable 15+ second ads or even more ads in a row. When is it going to be enough? Are we supposed to take them on their word that this is necessary, simply assuming that they need it because they don’t even share financial numbers? Is our only other option to pay up, once again, the amount that they decided is a fair compensation and also keep increasing?
Seems that at the very least some way for the users to negotiate what they believe is fair is lacking in this matter. On the lack of that, no wonder some people just decide they refuse to be squeezed forever.
I paid for paid for premium for a while. Then it showed me an ad for paramount + anyways. So I said fuck you google and installed an ad blocker.
Point being I was willing and did pay for the premium service. But even “ad free with premium” still wasn’t ad free. It was “ad reduced”
I’ve had Premium since whenever it was first introduced (a decade at this point?) and I’ve never seen a youtube-provided ad during that time, assuming I’m logged into the appropriate account.
The existence of the paid offering doesn’t invalidate use of the free offering, regardless of whether people are permitting ads on the latter. Any given Youtube page is just a collection of web elements and a call to a video server: these things get loaded or blocked at my sole discretion. My hardware, my web browser, my internet bandwidth, my opsec, my time.
If I put household items out on the nature strip, I have no expectation that passers-by will have a cup of tea with me first, then take every item as an indivisible lot. So my proposal to Google is: take those items off the nature strip, put them back inside the house and lock the door. Until they do that, no issue exists, despite the company’s efforts to fabricate one.
I cannot get ad-free experience with YT Premium. I can only get ad-free videos bundled with a whole bunch of other useless shit I will never use like YT Music. And the simple reason why I cannot get only ad-free videos is because then I would pay them less, so they don’t give me the option.
I’ve recently been downvoted to oblivion for writing this exact thing, talking about online newspapers.
People don’t want ads and they don’t want to pay. They just expect to get stuff for free and I can’t decide if that’s because Lemmy is either filled with spoiled brats, or people who genuinely do not know how the world works, or both.
In their partial defence, I must say that the way companies have used the Internet up until a few years ago may have led them to believe that free content is a thing.
And, before someone comes along and tries to tear me a new one, YES, I do use uBlock on sites that harvest too many data (e.g. anything by Google) or sites that are too aggressive with ads. But at least I know that I’m either a freeloader or, in the best case scenario, a protester. And I know that, if everyone did the same, so much of the internet would just shut down or go behind paywalls.
I provide financial support to the services I believe in, Washington Post, NYT, Nebula, previously HBO, a few others.
But it’s absolutely on my terms. If I were a broke college student. I’d have no issues pirating literally everything. As it is, I’ll find ways to get the stuff from companies that get too greedy. “Public secrets for sale” isn’t a thing, and that’s all data of any form really is. The difference between someone telling you the basic plot of a movie and telling you every pixel of the movie isn’t all that far apart, just the amount of data they’re repeating.
Nah, it’s neither.
It’s that while I do enjoy whatever it is, if it were to disappear because I’m ad blocking and won’t sub then … ohh well?
There are a select few groups I actually care about and I donate to them (like PBS).
Anything else will either find a way or die but I don’t care which.
that’s my take too, everyone wants free youtube, well the servers aren’t free, the content creators don’t do it for free, youtube is as big as it is and has as varied content it has is because they provide a platform, but then people want to watch it both for free and without ads.
Yes, thank you! I’ve been downvoted previously in a topic similar to this one. I know change can be hard for some people but we always knew this would come sooner or later. A huge company wants to make money off their service and people here act as if it’s their right to find a way around it. It’s not. You were just lucky that there was one. Either find other entertainment or accept that you will get ads.
