cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/2883134 (!android@lemdro.id)
These tech companies have underestimated their utility. They are mostly providing mindless time wasters. If you try to charge money or create inconvenience, people will look for something else to do.
Their attention is your lifeblood, and you’re actively giving them reasons to look elsewhere. The VC grow-at-all-costs business model is fundamentally flawed. It doesn’t scale when profitability becomes a priority.
Their attention is your lifeblood, and you’re actively giving them reasons to look elsewhere.
👍
My attention is all the currency YouTube will ever get from me - and it should be enough. If I post videos to YouTube (for nothing in return) and I talk to people about videos I saw on YouTube or link them to videos - then I am a net gain for Google and they should treat me as such. If anything, they should be working (nicely) to try to get me to want to pay (or view ads) and just be thankful I’m there if I don’t pay (or view ads). Instead they’ve chosen to work at ensuring everyone is so goddamn pissed off at their bullshit that they’d rather make it their full-time job to never give them another dime. Good job, Google! Smart!
Edit: Oh look, half a dozen lectures about how Google has to make money somehow. Hi there YouTube shills, I thought I would see you here.
Look I hate YouTube ads too, and ads in general, but let’s say every user of a service is like you. Attention is all the currency they’ll ever get from you, that’s totally cool, absolutely. I’m totally that way too. But they’ve got to make money somehow, so if you’re not the paying customer, someone else has to be.
I’m not saying it has to be ad sales either, but if we want a world in which we can use services for free without ads, we need to come up with an alternative way for them to make money. It has to come from somewhere, and by the bucketload.
If every user thinks like you, then it doesn’t matter how many people you talk to or share links with, you’re not a net gain on their service, you bring nothing to it.
Why should they, or anybody, be thankful that you honour them with your presence, if you contribute nothing of value? What makes you so entitled to use somebody’s product for free with no strings attached?
Ads suck, I’m eager for us to move past them once we figure out an alternative that keeps products in business and us receiving things for free. But we can’t deny the reality we live in right now either. Even huge companies like Google (who yes, do suck) have to make money to survive.
I think generally you will find that people of this opinion hold that it is unreasonable that we have privatized basically all of the internet infrastructure. These people tend to be in favor of expecting the consumer spends more on hardware for hosting, and enthusiasts, hobbyists, non-profits, and occasionally companies develop the software necessary to make the internet function, rather than companies just paying for tons and tons of warehouses of servers, and then just forcing the software to all become fucked up walled gardens while the actual utilities everyone rests upon is left to rot.
they’ve got to make money somehow
But they have been, and for years. All the years I’ve run a smartphone Google has harvested and profited from my data. From Gmail to Chrome (before I switched) to Maps, etc - they have profited from people’s data at scale. So the argument that they need to make money somehow falls flat for me.
Also, if they charged like $2 a year to block ads, plenty of people would buy it. But like most things lately, the enshitification of our user experience continues. It’s not enough for companies like Google to “make money” - it’s never enough and their greed has no boundaries.
That’s why you see people like us pushing back - enough is enough.
Look I hate YouTube ads too, and ads in general, but let’s say every user of a service is like you.
I understand the message about needing to fund services to exist, but that stance I feel doesn’t always really work too well. Since if other users were like them then it’d also mean there might be a lot of stuff that doesn’t exist anymore which could be a pro like microtransactions ceasing to exist and move to subscription model failing.
And for YouTube might be completely different where depending on their taste maybe click baits turned people away if the person hated them, so those don’t exist. And long winded videos attempting to take advantage of the algorithm failed if they were someone who didn’t like videos that wasted their time, and everyone is like them.
Reddit might still support third party apps if everyone was like them, and lemmy bigger. That’s why if everyone was like them argument is just a weird one, since it turns minority actions into a majority and changes way too many things to focus on one singular thing.
To answer your questions - users such as this bring something more valuable than ad money. They bring data. Google harvests data and metrics on users in a million ways, packages this up, and sells it for considerably more than they make on ads. In free services such as this, YOU are the product.
Ads suck, nobody wants to watch them, and they simply represent google maximizing shareholder value at every opportunity, as they are legally bound to do under American capitalism. YouTube ads are not a critical revenue stream that will make or break them.
I will quite happily pay a reasonable price for the privilege of avoiding ads.
I understand why people block ads, even though they are a a free tier, even if I don’t agree with it.
The fact that the cost of YouTube Premium almost doubled overnight is making me rethink my ethics, when my current subscription is up for renewal, I will be reassessing whether to cease watching YouTube, watch YouTube with ads or determine another way of supporting content creators.
I will quite happily pay a reasonable price for the privilege of avoiding ads.
I won’t if the money goes to Google.
Youtube produces almost none of their own content, instead they rely on other humans to create that content.
Use your ad blocker if you want, but stop treating youtubers as google employees (they’re not, they often have a much more frustrating relationship than you do) and start supporting them through other means.
To you, those people are just helping you waste your time. if that’s your real argument here, stop wasting your fucking time and do something else more worth your precious time, or start supporting content producers directly through non-youtube methods. Or just stop fucking watching.
Those people aren’t on youtube because they’re buying into corporate google dick-wrangling, they want to produce videos and have them get watched, and youtube is a place that hosts their videos for free AND gives them ad revenue share for hosting youtube ads.
You aren’t some hero for adblocking youtube but still watching it. google won’t notice your small dip in their revenue, but the youtuber who made it will.
Wanna support the people who entertain you (or, i guess, “waste your time”, if that’s what you consider entertainment to be — if all you want is to waste your time, don’t ads do the same thing for you?). Pay them directly for their content. Want to take a fake stand that supports nobody but yourself and your own inconveniences, install an ad blocker and boast on the internet about how you’re totally fucking over google and the people who create youtube content by doing so. But don’t treat yourself like some hero for doing so.
If content creators provide 90% or even 60% of value to YouTube, why is Google a trillion dollar company while major content creators are fighting for scraps that fall from their table? Why are content creators who aren’t in the top tier compensated so little for what they bring to the table?
YouTube is nothing without content. Unionize. Stand together and get paid what you’re worth.
where do i find the 10-40% percent of youtube-produced content on youtube you’re talking about?
Google is a trillion dollar company because they do far more than youtube, and make the majority of their money from taking a percentage of ad revenue. This does include youtube, and youtube is only profitable to google because they can sell ads on top of it, because video hosting on the internet is fucking expensive.
i pay google nothing, just like you. i do, however, support my favorite youtubers outside of google revenue streams with my own money, either through direct support or merchandise.
Both installing an adblocker and not even going to youtube will cost google money. I don’t care which you do. But if you do watch specific youtubers regularly, support them directly, even if you do use an ad blocker.
You’re not a hero for adblocking google. You’re a hero if you support content creators outside of google, whether or not you watch them on youtube using an adblocker.
I was never defending google or youtube.
I was defending the people who produce content on youtube, and who do not enjoy the benefits of google’s wealth and market position, and are just trying to create their content.
adblock youtube if you want, but unless you’re also supporting the creators of your content outside of google, i have never paid google a dime either. don’t pretend this is about a big corporation. you just think you deserve to be entertained for free, regardless of who put in the effort to create it.
If you’re REALLY anti-google/youtube, STOP USING THEM. If you watch them with adblock, google can still spin your usage statistics into something that will appeal to investors, but youtube creators will be wondering why their numbers dwindle, because they don’t have investors to (lie to / spin numbers at). You’re still helping youtube, even with an adblocker.
On the other hand, if you support content creators outside of youtube? you are supporting them directly, without youtube’s involvement and without google even getting a cut. I do this for several youtubers, and support even more through merch and etc.
But sure keep telling me i’m defending the landlords because i’m getting mad at you for mistreating the staff and pretending you’re sticking it to the landlords.
There are no better adblockers, uBlock Origin is all you need and is already updated to bypass it.
Unlock origin is the adblocker that people are installing. There are a lot of people with shitty adblockers out there, I guess they are switching.
I bet all those people with shitty adblockers are also probably googling better ad/YT compatible blockers lmaoo
I searched “YouTube adblocker” on both google and DDG. The first mention of ublock origin was in the 1st page of Google (just at the bottom, under “recommended adblockers for Firefox”, the 2nd option). There was no mention of it on DDG, even though I clicked “more results” once (so searched the equivalent of 2 pages). The problem with Google search is not google, it’s SEO, that affects all search engines.
I just tried it and there’s plenty of results to Reddit references to U block origin on Firefox.
You’re clearly making an assumption here
After YouTube started filling their search results with mostly shorts, I stopped using it for new stuff. It’s terrible now.
Yeah youtubes attempt at being tiktok is just awful and they don’t even have options to not have shorts show up in the feed. On top of shorts just being inferior versions of regular videos without functional controls
This is what gets me. Wanna show me shorts? Ok. But why the fuck am I not allowed to rewind a couple of seconds if I want to? It’s an artificial, completely useless limitation that had no place in 2023.
So, no thanks.
For what it’s worth you can replace the “short” in the url with “watch” to get the old interface back.
I started blocking those from appearing when they first showed up. There are a number of ways to do it. The Blocktube extension is one.
if you click ublock, select the settings cog, then in the tab that opens select ‘my filters’, you can enter the following to do the same thing:
www.youtube.com##.ytd-rich-section-renderer.style-scope
Personally I avoid installing too many extentions as they are quite literally apps that auto open whenever you just want to browse the web (regardless of if you’re going to youtube, you’re computer runs a youtube specific adblock)
I switched to FreeTube and now all the shorts are on a separate page I can switch over to if I feel like watching them. It’s also got SponsorBlock built in. Now I can enjoy youtube with a clean, faster interface and google isn’t tracking a damn thing. All because google got greedy and made their user experience shit.
Yeah, I hate how crappy search now is.
It’ll show me a couple of videos, then shorts, then some kind of recommendation list. If I actually want to do a complete search for the thing, and only the thing, I’m looking for, I have to go to advanced options and specify I’m looking for videos. JUST videos.
I don’t even care about the shorts showing up in search results. What really irks me is that you get like 3 videos related to search results, then some random unrelated shit, 3 relevant videos, more unrelated garbage, and then the rest of the actually relevant videos. I am specifically searching for something, just show me the damn thing.
Yes. The way the default search now works is that, when you search you get:
- Three or four videos that are actually from your search.
- Some recommended playlists.
- The shorts tray that vaguely has some content related to your search.
- Maybe two or three more videos from the actual search.
- “People also watch” recommendations.
- “Shorts for you” recommendations.
If you want to get just your search results, cutting away shorts, playlists, and the recommendations that take up the majority of the search page, you’ll have to open up the filters and click on “videos” on the cl tent type list. Then you actually get to see the search results.
First thing I did when the shorts spam apocalypse started, was create custom ublock filters to strip them out of youtube as much as I could. Too bad I didn’t back them up before my system decided to go poof.
I just copied them over from here. Works for me.
Didn’t know about SponsorBlock until all this started. So many just found out ad blocking is possible.
I only heard about AdNauseum because of this whole debacle. It blocks ads, hasn’t temporarily broken (as far as I have seen), and I set it to “click” 80% of all ads it sees.
I have probably screwed whatever profile they built on me, cost the ad buyers money bc clicks, hurt the conversion rate for purchases to cost google money, and even possibly made money for my favorite creators and sites (depending on how they’re paid).
Though someone lmk if I am misunderstanding something about it.
The other person’s been downvoted pretty heavily so I’ll volunteer to accept some.
Sponsorblock is a shitty tool for extremely selfish people that only hurts small-time content creators. You can’t argue about your data privacy, malware, corporate profits, or Google. Sponsorships are literally the least invasive and most direct form of financial support the average person can get for their content without you paying them directly. YouTubers do it because Google is already fucking them over. There’s absolutely no higher justification for it beyond annoyance at an extremely minor inconvenience and a sense of entitlement to the work of others.
You people would go to a little league baseball game and tear down the banner for Tom’s Auto Care if you could. Not every attempt at making money is evil.
You people would go to a little league baseball game and tear down the banner for Tom’s Auto Care if you could.
If someone came out and shoved the banner in my face and didn’t let me watch the game until several seconds had elapsed, yes, I’d tear the banner down too. Because it’s unacceptable.
But no one does that. The banner sits there in the outfield on the wall being unobtrusive and not interrupting the game or the flow of the game. That’s acceptable.
Make the ads unobtrusive and not interrupt the flow of the video and I don’t care. The problem is YT / YTers don’t do that. That’s why Sponser Block exists.
Sponsor block is a different beast. Should we really be doing that to our content creators? No, definitely not. Is it them or the advertising company that suffers?
Edit: Actually really surprised about this. Couple weeks ago people are sticking up for YT premium prices. Now, you are against helping the creators you watch.
If you weren’t planning on paying for the product, the creator won’t take any hit from you using sponsorblock. In fact, the advertiser won’t either. Nobody will be hurt by it, because it was a massive waste of your time to start with.
Fair enough but you can’t plan on paying for a product before you have seen what it was.
Huh, Sponsorblock is basically muting TV ads like in the old days.
Why should I be forced to watch a sponsor almost always totally unrelated to the content I seek to watch, and that the YouTuber decided to upload?
My favorite aspect of sponsorblock is blocking the incredibly repetitive ubiquitous script that every single channel copies of like, subscribe, ring the notification bell.
This is actually why i don’t like it. Most of my subs do this kinda thing rarely but occasionally. Sponsorblock creates a gap in the video that is more jarring then the 1 second self promotion, wish there was an option to only block self promotions more then 4 seconds long.
You can still use sponsorblock and configure it to not skipping sponsor segments if you want, and still enjoying the benefits of automatically skipping useless segments such as intro, outro, subscription reminders, self promotion, recaps, etc.
You’re absolutely right. Sponsorblock directly harms the average people making content, it has nothing to do with Google.
It’s gross and reveals how much of the complaining about ads has absolutely nothing to do with privacy or malware or corporate profiteering or anything like that. These people are just nakedly selfish.
Wear those downvotes with pride. They mean you have a conscience and feel empathy.
Sponsors don’t pay the creator less if you skip the sponsor segment. That’s not tracked, at least not in a way that google will share with the creator or anyone else. If that changes someday, sure, you have a point. For now skipping the sponsor segment is as harmless as skipping through the commercials on TV.
Cheers. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a response to a normal ethical take. We complain about wanting free and open source products but by the looks of it nobody is able to sit through a 20 second sponsor.
If we had everything on a free open source platform people would still skip the sponsored segment.
I feel if the sponsor blocks keep up we’ll start to see the creators or sponsors combat it in ways we really don’t like.
I watch YT about once a week and usually an hour or less. Premium isn’t worth it for that low of use. Sponsors, I skipped, always. I’ve never once purchased from a sponsor. I also skipped subscribe crap manually (I’m not logged in, I can’t).
SponsorBlock just does it for me, kinda nice. The creator gets paid by viewership so I have helped when I watch.
Lemmy isn’t seen by 98% of the public so my mentioning it hardly spreads further awareness. What did spread it was YT themselves cracking down. It made news headlines and my own mother asked I come over and install one.
YT Streisand Effected themselves. They demanded we not use them and got more people using them because of it.
Now, my mom won’t see Google ads anywhere, not just YT. What a smart move because I know there’s probably a million new UBlock users.
The content creators get paid the exact same whether I skip the sponsor segment or not. YouTube doesn’t track that, or not in a way they share with anyone else at any rate. Sponsors aren’t going to pay the content creators less due to skips since they literally cannot see who skips the segment.
In other words, it doesn’t hurt the content creator in the slightest.
There’s also the option of biting the bullet and paying for YouTube Premium.
No. Never. I’d rather stop using YT at all than giving in to coerced user-tracking.
I mean, I might have considered paying for YT premium if I thought it offered some value (other than disabling ads) but I won’t sure as hell pay for anything that any company is trying to blackmail me into.
I mean you didn’t buy it before so why would you now? You don’t need excuses. You just don’t want to pay for it. Own it.
One could argue that we’re paying for it without our consent, given the fact that Google doesn’t pay anything in taxes. That’s a cool four billion a year (at least) that they get from the American taxpayer for free.
I use it because YouTube music is included and it’s great while driving, it allows background play even with the screen off (I’m talking about mobile).
There’s something more, but nothing that a pro user cannot already do with third tools.
I find it funny how sometimes apps “create value” by taking something away which is included by default in similar products and goes without saying.
In this context: YouTube is the only app I know which is denying to work when put into background or with the screen off.
Or take some car manufacturers who start asking for a fee just to use basic functionality.
But that’s the wrong way around. They don’t want you to pay, they make their money through advertising. They make far more money from advertiser’s paying to put up ads than they ever make from people paying for premium.
Same as with Facebook now bringing in an ad-free version (in the EU anyway) - they charge higher than is reasonable so that people will opt for the ad-supported free version instead.
It’s not that you are blackmailed into paying premium, it’s that you’re encouraged not to as a way of explicitly consenting to ads.
Basically, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
lmao you’re so wrong on ads being more profitable than premium, especially on a per-user basis
According to this you can expect to make around $18/1000 views. That’s with 55% going to the creator and 45% to Google. Which means that Google makes around $14.5 per 1000 views.
Coincidentally, that’s also rougly the price of YouTube Premium. Are you telling me that you watch a thousand videos per month?
For desktop install and use “FreeTube”.
Alternatively for your android phone you can use “GrayJay”
Never. Pay. For. YouTube. Premium
No, it works fine for me. It’s just an apk.
Abandoning YouTube is seriously more difficult than abandoning other “non-fediverse” general social media platforms, since it’s got so much useful content that gets straight up ruined by the company that owns the website.
I doubt PeerTube is anything better than Vimeo, at least for now, things can improve after all.
At this point, I don’t even care about the user tracking. I just don’t want to sit through unskippable ads anymore. Especially when it’s the same ad over and over again.
