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And still, I’m more likely to stop using YouTube than to stop using an ad blocker.
That’s what they want. Get all the users they aren’t able to monetize off the platform to lower their costs.
I mean, I like a good Google hate train as much as the next guy, but that’s kind of a legitimate thing to want.
Follow the damn train, CJ!
Ooooooh my dawg
It’s YouTube’s fault for setting the wrong expectations when they benefited from wild growth and success by being free all these years. I dare they go 100% paywalled. I know they won’t. Otherwise they can’t double dip on both premium and advertiser money. Even if they manage to go 100% paywall, it’s inevitable that they will start introducing adverts to paying customers as well.
Then I’mma leech HARDER
That’s a double edged sword though, lose viewers and you lose appeal to advertisers. Lose users and they’re going to go somewhere else. That somewhere else will eventually grow and be competition. The bigger it gets, the faster it will grow.
They used the “You” as in the people, during their growth years to build their platform. Now they are going against the people since they no longer need us.
Good news: you can have the best of both by watching everything for free through piped video!
Way ahead of you. Recently got Nebula, which has dramatically reduced the amount of time I spend on YT. Besides, this way I can help also the people who make the videos. They don’t need to be so dependent on the whimsical and unpredictable nature of the algorithm and the ever changing landscape of what is or isn’t advertiser friendly on the platform.
If YT feels like further cranking up the enshittification dial, I say, bring it on. I’m ready to drop my watch time even lower than it currently is.
I’ll never understand why they spend so much effort pushing ads into people’s faces that don’t want see them and so little making ads more attractive.
A very large chunk of what people consume these days is effectively already ads. Every Youtuber holding a product into the camera is an ad. And people want to watch that. They want to know what new products are out there. It just has to presented appropriately.
Forced ads with mandatory 5sec isn’t making people interested in your product, heck, numerous times I might have been interested in a product, but lost interested since I couldn’t rewind the ad or because the ad didn’t link to anything that gave me further information. A 15min video from a Youtuber reviewing a product in detail is way more effective than any regular ad I have ever seen, yet there are almost no ads in that style.
Too be honest I was fine with seeing an ad every few videos. But at some point it became unskippable ads before , during and after a video.
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I never had an issue with YT’s 1-2 skipable ads at the beginning, or even the banner ad. But they got greedy.
The midrolls and the unskipable ads was the trigger point for me.
I was fine with even having a couple very short unskippable ads every other video. Now it is all of them with one in the middle of videos longer than 5 minutes. And then of course the content creator has to put in an ad because YouTube does not pay shit for views.
Yeah and I wouldn’t even mind like 5 minutes of ads at the beginning compared to randomly dispersed in the middle
Oh sure, let me watch 5 MINUTES before watching a 7min clip.
Dedicated 5min are only marginally justified if the content is >60 minutes in length.Screw that much. I’ll give them 1 second per 5 minutes of video.
I mean, they didn’t get greedy, as far as everyone knows they are losing a ton of money (at least if you can extrapolate anytbing from the fact that twitch is massively unprofitable)
Pretty sure YouTube has already been declared to be profitable. But frankly I’m pretty suspicious of claims of unprofitability for services being run for over a decade. Why would any for-profit company bankroll them if it wasn’t worth it? There has to be some creative accounting going on.
Doubt it, if it was profitable, they would be announcing that to everyone as loud as they could. Besides, if twitch is unprofitable, I doubt that google is in a much better situation
I wouldn’t apply Twitch’s situation to YouTube, IF it’s even true, because YouTube got a much wider reach and more advertising possibilities than gaming and somewhat related audiences.
It doesn’t seem to me a given that they’d boast about their success either. Because if they hide the situation the way they do, they can do this, turn to the customers saying “Welp, I guess this much is not enough. Gotta put more ads on it and raise prices 🤷”. It’s easier to placate the users if they are convinced it is inevitable. I imagine you are considering of what investors might think if products are said to be unprofitable, but overall Google/Alphabet still gets tens of billions in clean profits every year.
Most of all, again, if this is such a money sink that in over a decade they couldn’t figure out how to make money of it, why would they still keep at it? Why wouldn’t they sell it off or close it? If I assume they are honest about unprofitability, as much as I doubt it, then they must be getting something else from it that is equally valuable as raw money. Maybe it’s user data. Maybe it’s the social clout of controlling a major media platform. But it has to be worth it to them or they wouldn’t be hosting it. It wouldn’t make sense.
But personally I just think they are lying about unprofitability, including Twitch. It’s just a convenient excuse for layoffs and price hikes. It’s not like they are going to show everyone their full balance sheets.
Interest rates have been low enough for long enough that many companies have been running on the “fake it 'til you make it” philosophy forever. Air BnB, Door Dash, Lyft, and countless others have never been profitable. But they survive by constantly taking out loans and collecting new investor money to increase their market share (the infinite growth scheme), hoping that they’ll either eventually have enough impetus to monopolize a market and bully it into being profitable, or get bought up by Google and co for a rich payout.
This is how YouTube and Netflix got profitable. They ran at a loss until they were popular enough to turn a profit, and then switched to maximizing that profit. I imagine the same is true for the big social media sites as well. Run at a loss until you have a big enough userbase to attract advertisers. And this is exactly why Tumblr was never profitable and Verizon basically killed it trying to make it profitable. Tumblr’s population has always been the groups advertisers like the least - minorities, LGBTQ groups, sex workers, and artists/creatives. So Verizon tried to sanitize it by purging them to make it attractive to advertisers, and consequently killed the userbase that gave it it’s potential for ad profits in the process.
I see what you are saying, but Google is still not bleeding money and YouTube has become very well established already. In fact, for years YouTube contributes to Google’s primary revenue source: Advertising. Of course, this is why they are opposed to ad blockers, that much makes perfect sense.
But I don’t see any indication that it’s not making ends meet. And I’m not taking an executive’s word as proof, much less one from a whole different company. It’s expected that they will say whatever make their actions look good, whether or not it’s true.
If they want to, they can go 100% paywalled. But I guess people like to conveniently forget that YouTube wants to double-dip.
That was the initially when YouTube was created. Everyone knows that Google has no problem cancelling anything that’s not profitable.
If it was profitable, then why did google stop posting the financial statistics for YouTube
to get the benefit of the doubt on unpopular decisions. Same thing with hiding thumbs down counter from videos.
A very large chunk of what people consume these days is effectively already ads
That’s what grinds my gears. I understand ads pay bills, but showing multiple ads before a trailer for a video game or movie is excessive.
I find it extremely funny that YouTube serving ads also strains the same video infrastructure they’re trying to increase revenue on.
There is potentially a world in which you want to see ads because ads themselves do technically provide a service. You do want to know about things you care about and would want to buy… you just don’t want it obnoxiously shoved into your face all of the time in psychologically manipulative ways.
Look at the way ads used to look “back in the day”, with details about the product, its features, and reasons you would actually want to buy it. New tractor model, this many HP, pulls 4 bottom plow, burns this much diesel per hour, buy now and grow more corn.
However it turned out that it worked better just to try to trick people into buying a product that they didn’t need, and that’s how we got the ads we have today.
True, but if corporations don’t care to adhere to ethical standards, then the users shouldn’t need to either.
Because a significant amount of our economy and daily life is predicated on filling it with superfluous crap. These ads are just a race for crap de jour.
It would also help if I were served ads that even attempt to approach the vicinity of my own interests. That is vanishingly rare.
SoundCloud serves me casino ads and ads in Spanish
I don’t gamble and I don’t speak Spanish
I don’t gamble and I don’t speak Spanish
…yet.
Like for real, you have all the money in the world and you know what I like and don’t, so why don’t tailor the ads to not annoy the fuck out of me?
I’d much much much rather watch ads for products that are not the least relevant to me. I’m not going to be an active participant in my own manipulation. I’d rather be annoyed.
Yeah the last ad I remember seeing was for a movie, that actually looked interesting. But rather than tell me the name in the first 10 or 20 seconds they wanted me to watch to the end before revealing. So I skipped straight out of that.
They used to have a popup that told you the movie title and they took that away, so now they get a skip. If I am actually interested, I just google the actor I recognize.
Youtube doesnt make money with the youtuber reviewing the product.
Yes, but that’s self inflicted. They make the rules. They build the software. They decide how ads are presented.
They sure are.
Those creators drive the traffic to the page.Which only has value to the corporation if the people driven there watch ads on said page.
A very large chunk of what people consume these days is effectively already ads. Every Youtuber holding a product into the camera is an ad. And people want to watch that. They want to know what new products are out there. It just has to presented appropriately.
I doubt so - Sponsorblock exists. I guess some don’t mind it because it supports the creators they like directly.
I don’t mean the sponsor segments, but the rest of the video. LTT, MKBHD and all the other tech channels, every movie and game reviewer and a lot of other stuff is all ads. Every single channel that is focused on showing you a new product is effectively an ad. And people watch it because they are interesting in seeing what new or interesting products are out there. There is no aversion to ads, there is an aversion to bad and annoying ads.
I’ll never understand why they spend so much effort pushing ads into people’s faces
money
Also, disappointingly, most people don’t care about the ad all that much.
A 15min video from a Youtuber reviewing a product in detail is way more effective than any regular ad I have ever seen, yet there are almost no ads in that style.
True. But probably that money does not go to Google but to the Youtuber directly, so for Google this is still a cost.
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Because that has been tried so many times over the decades.
The good sites put effort in to curate their ads and make sure they are things their audiences would enjoy. Lots of webcomics STILL have blog posts about doing this. Same with one of the more popular “steam deck” websites.
The problem is that this doesn’t work. Because people don’t permitlist those sites. They just block everything for the exact same reasons “I pirate it and if I like it I’ll buy it” was always a blatant lie for the vast majority of people (and no, I don’t care who consider themselves exceptions to that).
So when curated and “good” ads have almost zero benefit over shitty and obnoxious ones? The focus stops being “let’s serve good ads and trust our users to have our backs” and more “What can we do to actually get ANY ad revenue out of this so that we can keep the lights on?”
Because that has been tried so many times over the decades.
When? “Will it Blend?” is about the only time I can think of when a company went in an alternative direction and turned their ads into entertainment and was quite successful at that. How many products do even have as little as an official unboxing video? Stuff like the SteamDeck teardown is what I would love every company doing for all their product. But it’s super rare. Why limit your ads to 30sec fake nonsense when you could have 15min of talking about your product in detail?
They just block everything for the exact same reasons
There wouldn’t be a need or even the ability to block anything if it wouldn’t be forced on the user. If Youtube had a “show me a random ad” button, I’d click it. I don’t hate ads. I hate bad ads that are forced in my face when I don’t need them. I have plenty of downtime where I wouldn’t mind seeing what new products are around. Gameify that stuff. Make it interesting. Make it explorable. Make it interactive. You have million dollar budget, mountains of collected data and random garbage forced into the users face is the best you can come up with?
“What can we do to actually get ANY ad revenue out of this so that we can keep the lights on?”
You are forgetting that there is an advertiser in all this. People that care about getting clicks on ads will have no problem tricking users into accidentally clicking on ads. But why are the advertisers themselves ok with that? If I want to advertise a product I’d not be interested in paying for accidental clicks users were tricked into, I’d be interested in finding users that are interested in the product I want to sell. And I really don’t see current ads doing that very well. They might be better than literally nothing, but I really don’t see them being better than all the potential ways to make better ads.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Good point
Even when someone highlights a video as an exemplar of “being an ad”, people still are bombarded with alternatives that hinder the monetization of even that.
Let’s break that down
When? “Will it Blend?” is about the only time I can think of when a company went in an alternative direction and turned their ads into entertainment and was quite successful at that.
I mean, if your goal is for the ads to be entertaining, people REALLY liked Chuck (high concentration of chuds aside) and Community. And Soap Operas literally came out of the idea of integrating advertisements into media.
Also… it is not just a meme that people are increasingly more interested in the ads than the stoppages during the Super Bowl.
Also, this was a driving force behind Flash. Ads that were “games”.
But my point is more the efforts to make less obtrusive ads that are visually appealing AND relevant to the viewers.
How many products do even have as little as an official unboxing video? Stuff like the SteamDeck teardown is what I would love every company doing for all their product. But it’s super rare. Why limit your ads to 30sec fake nonsense when you could have 15min of talking about your product in detail?
Sorry. You are talking about wanting 15 minute pre-roll ads? Do you want to maybe rethink that? Please. I beg you. Don’t put that evil into the world.
Also: What you are describing is literally an infomercial. Ron Popeil’s rotisserie oven and bigass syringe come to mind, but also Vince “I got my ass beat by a prostitute” Offer and Billy “Never met anything I didn’t want to snort” Mays (RIP) come to mind.
Also… with a word from our sponsor, we have Linus “I can’t have a warranty because people would attack my family” Sebastien and LMG. Or any other heavily sponsored review channel. And… people run “sponsor block”. While watching a fucking ad for the latest Samsung phone.
There wouldn’t be a need or even the ability to block anything if it wouldn’t be forced on the user. If Youtube had a “show me a random ad” button, I’d click it. I don’t hate ads. I hate bad ads that are forced in my face when I don’t need them.
This is right up there with “I’ll buy it if I like it after I fully watch all twelve seasons”. Sure there are people who would willingly watch ten ads per hour if it meant that others didn’t have to see any. Uhm… Okay, I actually can’t even pretend that is true.
Or, to be slightly less mocking: Subscription models. Those have proven to be incredibly lucrative to people who “made it big” already. They are a constant struggle for up and comers. Because I would probably throw a few bucks at J Kenji Lopez-Alt every month if it got me a steady feed of recipes and videos. As much as I like him, I can’t see myself doing that for Ethan Chlebowski because he is still nowhere near as established and is very much a “home cook” in terms of “knowledge”.
Because, trust me, all your favorite content creators would love it if they didn’t need to do any sponsored content or negotiate with brands/marketing firms and just got a giant check in the mail every week from their fans. Very few can pull that off to the degree required to make “quality” content. Otherwise nobody would have ever heard of Raid Shadow Legends and Better Help.
Or, if I can move to the greater root problem of “how to make money while making media”, let’s look at video games. Some of the pseudo-live games will have a LOT of DLC. Like literally hundreds of cosmetic skins that have no bearing whatsoever on the gameplay and exist almost entirely as a “tip jar” to fund the free content updates. And… people lose their mind. And they use it as an argument that the game is bad because if you wanted to buy all 500 skins for your player character in an FPS that has been getting steady updates for 4 years now, it would cost you 300 dollars. THE HORROR. FUCK LAZY DEVS!!!
I have plenty of downtime where I wouldn’t mind seeing what new products are around. Gameify that stuff. Make it interesting. Make it explorable. Make it interactive. You have million dollar budget, mountains of collected data and random garbage forced into the users face is the best you can come up with?
Again, see the entire concept of sponsored media
You are forgetting that there is an advertiser in all this. People that care about getting clicks on ads will have no problem tricking users into accidentally clicking on ads. But why are the advertisers themselves ok with that? If I want to advertise a product I’d not be interested in paying for accidental clicks users were tricked into, I’d be interested in finding users that are interested in the product I want to sell. And I really don’t see current ads doing that very well. They might be better than literally nothing, but I really don’t see them being better than all the potential ways to make better ads.
Because advertisement works.
A few years back, one of the WWE shows basically ran an ad for “fuck time island” or whatever it was called every single commercial break. It was some sort of reality dating show or whatever. And you could watch in real time as the squaredcircle crowd started off by complaining and mocking and very rapidly changed their rules so they could have a discussion thread on it every single week where people were actually interested.
Or just think about how many times people have muttered 'eat fresh" while reading up on public transit in many cities.
They might be better than literally nothing, but I really don’t see them being better than all the potential ways to make better ads.
Again. Attempts have been made for literally decades. Sites curated really quality ads and people still ran adblock. Youtubers try to work with good companies for their sponsorships and people still run sponsor block. Hell, people often won’t even click the affiliate link to buy the product they just watched a 30 minute review of. The “better” way is something that people either haven’t blocked yet or can’t block.
I really wish government would just come in already and shatter google into a million pieces with the anti-monopoly hammer already.
Google is far worse than AT&T ever was when it was shattered into the baby bells.
Just gotta learn from AT&T to not let them re-congeal back together like somekind of fucked up liquid metal terminator 20+ years down the line.
50% of congress wants to know how the computer mouse stays alive without food.
They pretend to be ignorant but they’re really looking the other way because they’re lobbied for meager sums like $10,000
Our best and brightest?
Frankly, I’d stop using YouTube entirely before I’d start using it without an adblocker. At least there are no signs of it slowing down for me, yet.
I’d consider paying a few bucks a month, but not $10 or more
Get rid of shitty YouTube music and give me a tier that’s no ads only
That is precisely why Premium Lite was killed off, it did exactly what you are looking for.
I don’t think that was ever available in my country
That’s just leaving money on the table
Watching YouTube load slowly is better than watching ads.
Exactly! I started surfin’ da information highway in the 90’s. I remember watching an image unveil itself slowly as a morning sunrise.
I will download videos then. I refuse to not use an adblocker on the modern internet.
Pirate everything, it’s the only way to show greedy corporations the content should be free.
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This is why
privacyPIRACY is justified. The only way is not to pay!Edit: 🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
Did you mix up your buzzwords?
Privacy and Piracy go hand in hand, don’t you think?
It would be really cool to be able to download YouTube videos withour the sponsorship segments, I wonder if there is a way to do his already?
yt-dlp has a command-line option to download videos while using sponsor block.
yt-dlp https://youtube... --sponsorblock-remove allLike the ads surrounding the video and breaking the video up or the spots in the video where the creator hawks their latest wares?
On android, I use Seal. Its basically a frontend for yt-dlp and has a sponsor block feature.
Honestly, I’m ok with at least giving channel ad reads a shot. Those aren’t based on my watch history/search history and the channel owner actually gets a good cut. Almost nobody can make a living with google ads.
I swore I’ve seen a FOSS project that did that. An ad segment detector basically
If I see one more PCBWay ad…
My worry with all this is that they might say fuck it and put DRM for all YouTube videos which would block attempts to download the videos. Not make it impossible as seen with streaming services but not as trivial as now…
Time to quit YouTube then
Heck yeah let’s all go to break.com
Didn’t know this was still a thing haha. It brings me back
I already subscribed to someone on Floatplane. If it gets much worse on YouTube, it might be time to switch fully.
The day they go 100% paywalled, is the day their dominance ends. They will never do this because, contrary to the corporate dickriders in this thread they rely on bait and switch tactics to draw the crowd in the first place.
I didn’t say anything about paywalled.
Google’s plan is to DRM the web
Well the good news is Widevine is very expensive, and doesn’t work. It’s not as simple as right click / save target as, but Widevine decryption is why you can torrent any of the shows/movies on those streaming services.
Everytime someone requests a video on those services, the service pays a fee to Widevine. $0.50 USD per request for the first 30k requests/month. How much you think Google is willing to pay someone for you to watch cat videos for free?
Google owns Widevine, they would be paying a fee to themselves
You’re right. But then it’s also their cost incurred. Their decryption keys to revoke on exploited devices, and their engineers to try and come up with a software patch for their hardware-level CDM. It’s costly was my point.
“We’ll make our service worse, that’ll show them!”
Ok google, good luck with that.
Unless you inform those customers with some kind of UI that they’re being throttled because of ad-block how does Google expect them to uninstall it?
I genuinely believe they are trying to push adblock users off the platform completely
At this point I’m convinced they’re trying to drive people away to shrink the overhead on bandwidth and servers, but it doesn’t work like that. Not after you got them hooked on videos of cats after years of a steady drip of memes.
I wish we can fast forward to the part where Youtube completely destroys itself and a new platform takes its place so we can enjoy it for 10 years before the enshittification cycle restarts again.
The problem is that only conglomerates can eat the cost of running such a platform. Ads will be the end of free interne, that’s for sure.
So I have YouTube premium but also have ad-blocker, for the first time yesterday I was noticing absolutely abysmal speeds on YouTube and I suspect this is why. I thought my computer was starting to shit the bed initially it was so brutal.
I have YouTube premium
Wow, so you pay them and they still screw you? Glad that’s a product I’ll never buy then!
I know, right? But I suppose their reasoning is that my ads are also blocked across the rest of their ecosystem, my subscription isn’t covering those losses.
Still though, a model that requires that customers look at something they don’t want to nor will engage with smells like failure.
I’m generally okay with the idea of “you can get it for free and we’ll include ads to pay for it, or you can pay instead”.
Where I’m definitely not okay is “you can pay, and we’ll include ads anyway.”
The sick twist is that I use Ublock Origin and won’t ever pay for YouTube premium and I haven’t experienced even the slightest issue streaming videos on YouTube. 😂
Anecdotally at best. I know it’s not what you want to hear, but you’re making a conclusion based on something one person said.
I have YouTube premium and an adblocker and I don’t have this problem. I’m skeptical that it’s related.
I have YouTube premium and an adblocker and I don’t have this problem. I’m skeptical that it’s related.
I too am a YouTube premium customer, and my video performance is horrible lately.
Funny enough, on my living room smart TV YouTube app my performance has been bad as well, even though I am logged in to my premium YouTube account.
Something is going on, and it does effect some (at least) premium customers.
Wasn’t that exactly how the adblock blocks went out in the first place? Only a few areas at a time were affected.
Same, YT Premium, Firefox, ad blocker, no issues with streaming.
So, since writing the above I’ve been having issues with YouTube. I’ve been connected to my VPN, so perhaps that’s part of it (by which I mean Google slowing it down, the VPN doesn’t noticeably slow down any other sites).
I tried deactivating my ad blocker, but it hasn’t made a difference. I’ll try more stuff to see if I can figure it out.
I was wondering if this was coming. I don’t use YouTube in-browser much if at all, so I don’t see this. But I am not surprised. The fact that they’re slowing down people who pay for premium is kind of an act of war. It shouldn’t be a thing, and the fact that it’s happening at all is a misstep on Google’s part. Not that the whole slowing down people who use ad blockers isn’t. But this will detrimentally affect adoption of premium subscribers which I thought was the last thing they’d want. Because they obviously don’t make enough off ad revenue to support the platform. That’s part of why they push premium so hard. They need more premium subscribers. This is idiocy.
I can’t remember what video I watched that talked about the unsustainabilty and likely the late stages of an ad revenue driven internet content model, and this situation reeks of that.
I don’t know what new paradigm might replace it if this is the case, but the current model feels like it’s absolutely failing.
I have premium, uBlock Origin, and Mullvad VPN. In Firefox the other day, the stream was dying every 10-30 seconds. Like it would just stop and give me a spinner. I would have to “Copy URL at current time”, open a new tab, and paste it in to get it to go any further. I do have bad internet, but this was nuts. And then I gave up and used Duck, and it played flawlessly in their embedded player.
Good job, Google.
If it happens again, I’ll try disabling uBlock Origin on YouTube and see if it improves.
After getting premium I just switched the adblocker off for YouTube. Premium would be far too expensive if it didn’t also include YouTube Music :-/
uBlock Origin works on YouTube Music, too.
If you want to throw a few bucks at the people providing you a service, then donate to an ad blocker for helping make the Internet a safer, better, and more user-friendly place. …not the big fuckers like YouTube who are contributing to the enshitification of the entire web.
Ublock doesn’t accept donations
While uBlock would be most deserving of a donation imo, there are others that do accept. Even if it’s an ad blocker you don’t actively use, you’d still be supporting a developer who’s using their time and skills to improve the web.
Donating to no one would be better than paying YouTube.
YouTube already has ways to block users with adblock. They just haven’t fully rolled it out yet.
Lately they blocked playing videos when I had uBlock Origin running, but it was just a warning I could click away. They might also slow down page loading and playback.
YouTube has the ability to lock users with adblock out, they are just very careful about using it. Mostly starting with trials in smaller countries and getting more bold over time.
Ha! Serves you right
Oh no (continues to watch on freetube) anyway…
Revanced Extended ftw!
Alternative front ends are a god send.
What is freetube? (Sorry for the stupid question)
One of many different “third party frontends” for YouTube which, amongst other things, cut out ads and avoid performance throttling.
Personally I use one called NewPipe, and previously one called LibreTube. There are others too.
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One of the few uYou+ users on iOS.
I dusted off an old laptop, put debian on it, put an SSD and now I have my own invidious instance, among other services…
No ads, no throttling, no bullshit. Google is very welcome to suck it. I’d gladly stop using youtube, but there’s no competition.
I know it’s a pain, but what’s to stop us from using download-clis? In theory I could “collect” the urls that are recommended to me from my home page, call the clis, click all the videos to update my recommendations then close the browser.
I know it’s a pain, but what’s to stop us from using download-clis?
The answer is right there.
using the browser isn’t necessary to keep your watch history up to date.
yt-dlp can log in as you by reading your cookies from your browser, and, with the optional --mark-watched flag, mark your downloaded videos as watched in your YT account.
TIL. Thank you very much. Looks like I’m going to be using that if YouTube gets even more painful.
The no competition in the market, is the issue. Hope the situation improves in near future. With it innovations will gradually increase & the demand within the markets will point the directions.
If everyone keeps expecting everything for free there will never be competition :)
Let me convince you otherwise:
- Who set that expectation in the first place? Don’t all cut-throat corps undercut the previous established companies and gained a lot of market share by being “loss leaders”?
- Do you think YouTube would dare to go completely Pay only?
- Lack of competition is not an excuse to double dip on both customer data and advertisements.
- People who say that we need to pay for server costs should consider that streaming services are now asking for money but also introducing adverts. The money is too lucrative for them to leave on the table.
- Everybody is happy to pay when there’s 1 service or 2 services that give them everything for a nominal fee. Cases in point: Netflix, Steam.
- A lot of people pay for twitch because it’s the only platform they care about. Paying for A platform doesn’t mean we will pay for ALL platforms.
Let’s not pretend like Google isn’t earning any money
Or, there is plenty of competition even now, but since users are the product, not the customer, the competition isn’t what people think it is or should be.
There is competition when it comes to technology stack. People just don’t want to use alternatives because the amount of content/users is less on others.
Be the pioneer and help others move across.
Care to share any of the recommendations? I don’t use YouTube often but would be happy to visit and use an alternative
Next step is guaranteed to be limiting the number of views without being logged in.
I have YouTube premium. It still detects the adblocker. It’s infuriating.
The more stuff they do to shoot themselves in the foot, the sooner something else comes in to replace youtube
I wish I could do the same thing with my 2008 VAIO laptop :/
Thank you for reminding me to get myself an invidious instance set up. It isn’t a huge pain or anything, right?
Not really, they have a docker compose file ready to go, and it works without issue.
I don’t have an ad blocker, I just have the standard strict tracking protection enabled in Firefox. What’s more, I pay for YouTube Premium. But still they add a five-second delay every time I visit a web page. It’s infuriating.
Might as well just stop paying for premium then if they’re going to ding you anyway.
there is no way the 5 second sleep before loading isnt anti competitive, because last i heard, unless they changed it, it only checks for the firefox user agent.
Actually insane that someone would willingly implement that.
Why pay when you can watch it for free without ads through piped video! Pirate everything, live for free!!
If I were to guess, non-android smart tv. There are very few options if any for these TVs. Since I got my TCL google tv I just put smarttube on it and that was it, no more ads and cast still works. But can’t do that with parents’ old chromecast or lg TVs
If anyone is curious about the reason, my primary motivation for having Premium is that I don’t want my kids to see more ads than necessary, and they’re on YouTube on their phones, on the Chromecast (connected to a dumb projector) and on the computer.
The YouTube app has a lot to offer them that they won’t get in other apps and I can’t realistically force them to use other alternatives everywhere. Especially since I have shared custody and they’ll be using YouTube at their mom’s place as well.
That’s why Invidious exists.
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Pornhub owns most of those alternatives.
*Aylo
I love how they have clearly tried to hide that they make their money from porn. They used to be called MindGeek. The private equity firm that owns them is called Ethical Capital Partners.
Ethical Capital Partners
So I assume they can guarantee none of the women in the porn they show are victims of human trafficking.
(I can’t know that in the porn I watch either, but I don’t host it.)
in fairness, they did delete most of their content base after a minor was found to be on the platform. To the degree that keeps investors happy, i suppose they do.
People dont really care where their content comes from, so long as it loads properly. But content creators dont want to migrate from the platforms they have all their followers on. If i have a decent YouTube channel that is large enough to be my primary income, I’m locked in because there is no real way to migrate all those followers over to a new platform. Nebula is the closest i think we have to a true YouTube competitor, but it’s a tiny fraction of the user base and most Nebula videos are available on YouTube for free.
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Monetizing one is much easier than the other.
I’m actually really surprised pornhub hasn’t moved into the YouTube like space. They have the infrastructure and expertise. Why not branch into that ? Especially if YouTube keeps pissing off users.
Reputation, if you think Nintendo is copyright happy when people put their things on YouTube wait for it to be on “pornhub kids”
LoL wouldn’t even let YouPorn’s team compete
People will pirate porn, they don’t care to pirate COD montages
Use a different front end like piped video! All the content is free and no ads!
Don’t worry, YouTube, I won’t be using your website anymore. But my yt-dl will be ripping max quality videos by the hundreds, just for shits and giggles.
Yarr harr, it’s the pirate life for us!
