My “favorite” lecture from young people is the one in which they berate me for “stealing content” by not watching ads on YouTube.
I have a vivid memory of YouTube being a platform where normal people could share videos of their kids and pets or other fun random low quality but entertaining things
I don’t understand why they think we care if we’re stealing content regardless. I pirate movies and TV shows, but they don’t whine about that, in fact, most will approve of it. Why draw the line at YouTubers?
They often say that we’re screwing the person who runs the channel. In reality, I’m willing to bet my left nutsack that they make a fuckton more from the occasional donations than from ads, once Google, MCNs, and the government take their share.
Pretty sure most YouTubers and streamers will tell you exactly that. Sponsorships and brand deals make them way way more
I have a small channel (5k) and YouTube ads make about 40% of what I earn.
Because they think that they’ll be YouTube superstars one day, and we’re stopping them
YouTube has increased the amount of ads that used to be standard by about 1000%. You used to get about 22-26 minutes of actual content per 30 minutes of viewing. On YouTube it’s about 2 minutes of advertising per 0.5-3 minutes of viewing. The majority of the things I watch on YouTube are short 30 second videos to see specific things, but Google seems to think it’s okay to show me 2-3 minute long commercials before letting me see the 30 second blurb telling me the foot pounds per square inch I need to apply to my brake calipers before I can finish my brake change job. This is even more annoying now that Google doesn’t surface this type of information on regular websites, where I can just quickly read the spec.
TLDR: fuck Google and fuck ads
It feels like YouTube has become the new Hollywood with production companies and YouTubers becoming celebrities and whatnot. Such a far cry from it’s beginnings as a place where people would upload random family videos that nobody watched.
Literally the first video posted was one of the creators in a selfie video at the zoo. That’s the YouTube I want back. That’s what it was meant to be.
really funny to me that it’s now been split into parts on the scroll bar
The family members watched them, which was good enough for the person uploading it. Not everything needs to be about money and exposure. Ugghh! K.k kill me.
I have an honest question and I feel like Lemmy is a good place to have a real discussion on this. To preface this, I use adblock too so I’m kinda calling myself a hypocrite with this question :P
Why do we expect any free service not to have ads? If a paid service like Netflix introduced ads I’d be pissed, and same goes for cable TV these days. But why would something free like Youtube not have ads? How can we be bothered by ads on a service we’re getting for free?
Someone help me reconcile this for my own well-being haha.
Why do we expect any free service not to have ads?
Youtube has the right to serve ads along with the content, but it does not have the right to dictate what I can or can’t do with the data once it hits my machine. It has no more right to hijack my property to force them upon me than it does to strap me to a chair and force my eyes open, A Clockwork Orange style.
If Youtube doesn’t like that arrangement, its recourse is to serve a 403: forbidden instead of the video data.
There’s also a deeper discussion to be had whether corporations have any sort of right to exist in their current form in the first place, but I’ll leave that for another time.
Is is like muting during a commercial break, or going out of the room to do something else. What happens in my home, is under my control. You want to stop me from doing that? Refuse to serve me content. I’m fine with that
Ads arent inherently the problem. The problem is that the user experience often gets ruined because, for example, on certain news sites every paragraph of text you read, you get a full page ad. Imo when its like this its fully acceptable to not let them have limited revenue from you.
You’re asking someone who’d spent a good chunk of my life creating Skyrim mods for free and volunteering for services in my community with no recompense or desire for money how I expect people to contribute things they presumably enjoy without getting paid? To be clear, you’re asking me this from a server on a federated platform that is held together with community love and free-will donations?
I know we’ve been conditioned by capitalism to reduce everything to its monetary worth, but I feel like we should know better here.
Fair point, but the instance I use doesn’t allow image uploads because of the disk space issue. Videos take way more space than that. And, of course, you can’t just slap in a single drive, you need RAID or something so when a drive fails, you don’t lose stuff.
Add in bandwidth concerns, and it’s a legitimate question. Hosting a general video site can’t be cheap, and people generally won’t pay for it.
If we did want a community run video hosting site ala Lemmy, how would that work? What would it cost the hosters?
To add on to what the others have said, there should always be competition between free and paid services. Free services should provide only what they are capable of with the limitations they operate under due to a donation model, while paid services can use all the advantages they can get with advertising, big budgets for hosting, etc. Free and open-source often still won under these conditions. Think Encarta against Wikipedia. If paid wins, that’s fine, people can still have a reasonably good alternative with the free option.
The problem arises when a corporation builds on the back of a free resource, and then starts charging users once the network effects kick in. With YouTube, Google was able to leaverage 20 years worth of videos that people lovingly uploaded (although 10 of those years were in the post-ad plagued world) and then start forcing people to bend to their monetization rules. Most of those people didn’t upload to YouTube because they wanted to make money off their videos, they just wanted to share a funny video. If given the choice, they would have chosen free instead of ad-driven. We have no choice since all that content is now locked behind YouTube’s ad walls.
The ads themselves are not a problem. The problems are
- It can be security risk. Even Google has ads that redirect to malicious domain
- Ads that are getting in the way of accessing information. That includes popups, automatically playing videos etc. Hell, one of the major reason why I started using adblock was to block those annoying flash banners.
- The frequency is just way too much. This leave no money on table mentality makes me not give a shit.
Now it’s so commercialized that I’m not posting anything on YouTube anymore, simply because I know that I’m going to get so many emails about how my video of me building a Lego set or whatever, violated some new social taboo that was invented 5 minutes ago, and how they are going to send the YouTube police after me to send me to the shadow Realm
Remember when people just uploaded videos to YouTube for fun instead of money?
Not really going to get into it with you, because you clearly have your mind made up, but you pretty much nailed why at the end.
I have a vivid memory of YouTube being a platform where normal people could share videos of their kids and pets or other fun random low quality but entertaining things
People spend a lot of time and money making videos these days. They aren’t just random low quality things. They have teams of sometimes hundreds, use cameras worth half a million dollars, and may take a week or month to record said video while paying those hundreds of employees.
Again, not going to change your mind, Lemmy is very open about not giving a shit about others when it comes to money, but it’s not 2006 anymore, and people need to make their money back AND pay their employees.
Personally I’m fine watching a few ads to support the content I clearly want to watch. Seems weird you’d be interested enough in what someone has to show you, but refuse to help them in any way, but whatever.
Remember guys, don’t forget to hit the downvote button if you haven’t already. How dare I say anything positive that isn’t just “fuck ads, fuck YouTube, fuck everyone!”
Don’t worry, you didn’t need it.
Lemmy losers click downvote the millisecond anyone says something positive about anything non-FOSS, or a bigger corporation. You already clicked that button, just like you’ve already downvoted this one.
people need to make their money back AND pay their employees.
that’s very much a “them” problem. if i don’t want to watch ads, you won’t guilt me into it.
Tell me how to filter all that highly polished crap from my feed and searches, because I don’t want it. I hate all that shit being shoved at me. If I wanted to watch someone spouting bad takes with a highly polished commercial-friendly veneer, I’d watch cable. I hate all those monetized channels, and they can all go under for all I care, along with that entire hellsite. Then more people would support actually good non-monetized projects like peertube.
Even if what I’m doing is stealing, it’s a good thing. Can’t wait for YouTube’s demise. It’s not a fun site to use anymore because all the good non-monetized content gets buried in favor of these soul-sucking assholes.
I don’t even click people’s links anymore, because it’s always some rich bearded white male with the most painful content.
If they use all that stuff to shoot the video, it means they already made it or they spent money they shouldn’t have.
I didn’t mind getting a handful of ads an hour, i do mind that i now get like 20 minutes to watch some youtube because adulting sucks and Youtube is like: swallow these 7 ads bitch, guess what bitch we forgot we showed you 7 have some more cunt and now my 20 minutes is fucked, so i say: time for Youtube to get bent.
If what i hear is right, they are and have been operating in the red for a long time. Half of their creators are better business people than they are.
If they use all that stuff to shoot the video, it means they already made it or they spent money they shouldn’t have.
Pretty clear you’ve never owned a business. You have to invest money to start it.
If you feel that way, you should really be paying for YouTube premium, since that actually gives more money to the creators you watch than ads would. That’s the one thing that sold me on it.
I agree with your thought process but supporting YouTube by paying for it after they intentionally enshitified it to the point where you want to is the entire problem.
Use an adblocker and donate directly to creators. If someone needs to steal my time to afford to run their business, then they can’t afford to run their business.