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How would you like for Youtube to pay for the infrastructure around getting those videos to you? Who do you think should be paying to host, manage, and operate the service?
If it's such a burden for Youtube, maybe they should stop focusing on maximizing watch time and keeping people on the site resulting in screen addiction, one of the many ills of modern society.
I think Youtube being so centralized and massive is itself a big problem. Rather than people hosting their own websites where they distribute their own videos and eventually finding ways to distribute videos cheaply, people just decided to outsource video hosting to Youtube, and now they've built up a huge network effect where you can't simply take all your videos and move to a different site, and even if you could you can't just take all your viewers with you. Even the content creators on this service are called "Youtubers" rather than creators. Separately, centralization poses huge questions for archival and preservation of a huge aspect of our culture. What happens if the entire thing goes down? Youtube is even actively hostile to downloading videos and archival efforts, they likely threatened the youtube-dl developers into going away, and the replacement fork yt-dlp is constantly having to make changes and is slowly weakening in accessibility and usability through no fault of their own.
I wasn't expecting to write an anti-Youtube screed, but this is how I feel. I guess my answer is that I don't care if Youtube has to bleed money to provide a service without ads, because the consequences of that are more desirable than the status quo.
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I mean, given that I go out of my way to not buy anything I see advertised to me, and I use adblock as much as possible outside of that, I'd say it's not me either way.
More seriously, I don't think it should be regulated out of existence; I was just opining that a lot of advertising is annoying as shit and if I could make it all go away with a sweep of a magic wand, I would.
Yes yes, it's very fun being a free rider. Convenient that there are still enough rubes that we can get away with it for a while.
But you object to advertising and you object to paying for youtube, but you like watching youtube. How do you think youtube should be funded?
My answer is, I don't have to care. I'll ride for free until the wheels fall off, and then I'll pirate everything until copyright enforcement assassins break in through the ceiling and kill me. I will live in a cave and eat bugs and make the rest of humanity join me before I ever watch god damn commercials again.
Y'all gotta stop trying to replace a good system with a fair one.
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I am not convinced that people using adblock or not buying advertising products are free riders. I suspect its anyone who's revenue is derived from ads.
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I mean, ideally I'd be able to pay the individual channels that I like watching money, based on my usage, and have YouTube take some percentage of that.
Given that my only option though is to pay $13.99 directly to YouTube, I think I'll pass.
Not a bad response. At least on Twitch, buying a membership to a particular channel and removing ads from it are part of the same transaction. On Youtube, buying a membership supports the creator, but doesn't disable the ads (not to mention the in-video sponsored ad reads, sigh).
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That is what YouTube premium is, though the percentage that YouTube takes is probably higher than you'd like.
Do creators get directly compensated for Premium users who watch their content?
The formula is a bit opaque, but creators are compensated for views, and YouTube Premium views are worth more than regular ones (among regular ones, there's also differences based on their geography, etc. due to the ad spend they generate).
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Many (most?) youtube channels have patreons where you can actually do that. Usually with extra perks.
That doesn't get rid of the advertisements on the video.
???
Does it not?
Watching videos on Patreon definitely gets rid of youtube adds. And the only creators I've ever followed on Patreon have Patreon cuts without internal adds. I guess there could be someone who doesn't edit out the adds in the Patreon version of their videos? But that would be a bit shit and I certainly wouldn't give them my money.
Is there a specific creator you're thinking of that has a Patreon with adds?
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I think I've seen the setup that you describe on Your Movie Sucks. But most channels, such as Red Letter Media, Gomlet X, and Raocow, do not upload separate Patreon-exclusive or YouTube Member–exclusive ad-free (non-monetized) videos.
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