You know what annoys me the most about this?
I looked up the price of Premium. It’s not great but not too bad either. I hate subscription services so I thought “I’ll just buy the annual plan”
Google doesn’t offer the Family Annual plan in my region. Only Individual Annual.
Fucks sake Google! If I’m trying to give you money, the least you could have done is make it easy!
Only ever watch YouTube via SmartTubeNext. Ad free for free. Fuck you Google.
Me personally, I didn’t mind ads back in the day when they weren’t so annoying. But somehow YouTube + content creators made ads so annoying at some point that I started to use ad blocker and sponsor skipper.
My theory is that by becoming so aggressive with ads , YouTube income / video actuallly decreased due to people getting fed up with ads and getting ad blockers. Now they go even more aggressive so people will start to look for alternatives.
It’ll be interesting to see following development.
That’s when my family asked me to set up adblockers.
It used to be a single 30 second ad but skippable.
It’s now 2 ads skippable, then ads randomly injected into a video. A ten min video can have twelve ads. Defenders say “Oh the content maker sets those features.”
Of which I say, “Bet. Gonna block them, find a new revenue stream because the next stage is pirating your shit.”
This is when you’re supposed to use the FOSS alternatives
Me personally because I don’t have a Google account nor saw a real gain in getting one (for what I do in my day to day), I just switched to these for subscriptions.
You should also start looking into libredirect, an extension to route your youtube traffic to invidious instances
+to that. However I haven’t found proper alternative yet.
- I got so used that dump algorithm that at least 40% of times recommends what I’m actually interested at, that it feels so hard to go back to watch unordered vids
- Newer content is still lacking on alternatives. Like coding tutorials or documentaries etc.
- On the other hand I found many old forgotten internet classics on these alternative sites like old ads and funny clips that we used to watch at 240p back in the day.
I need YouTube like I need another barium enema.