Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Sooo. What are your plans for surviving the YouTube ad-pocalypse? In case you don't know, YouTube seems to be cracking down on ad-blockers, steadily ramping up their level of restrictiveness over the past 4 or so months, and ramping up even faster the last 3 weeks. Adblock Plus no longer seems to work for me on Chrome, but does work on Firefox. It'll probably be different for everyone as they dial it up for more and more customers, but it'll likely keep getting more restrictive as time goes on.
I'm guessing this has to do with the same tech trend that caused the layoffs this past year. Budgets are tighter, bubbles are popping, and sources of revenue are being more exploited. But I do wonder if this particular one will work out for Google or not.
I for one plan on leaving the platform if I ever am completely unable to make it work without ads. I think there are many others who feel the same way. This may (I hope) make things worse for content creators, especially those who rely on their own sponsorships for revenue, and will drive them towards other less restrictive platforms.
It's not like I think it's immoral or wrong for Google to pull this, but it does bother me. YouTube has been around for so long, it's life a part of my life. It's my TV, it's the way I learn and become better at most things, and for many many people, it's their livelihood. My wife randomly said to me last week as I was teaching myself some drumstick fundamentals (the kind of fundamentals with deep intricacies that you can't see easily, and need an in-depth video to go into), "how did anyone ever learn anything before YouTube?" After having been around for so long, and being so ingrained, it feels weird for YouTube to suddenly switch up how it works. I'm someone who likes to skip around videos and go back and forth a lot. When ads are present on YouTube, I cannot stand how you'll skip to a section of a video, even without having watched much actual content in the video yet, and suddenly have to watch a giant string of ads. Having to watch ads like that will ruin my usage of the platform.
I also wonder if it's technically possible for YouTube to completely crack down on all ad-blockers, but I don't know enough about how their APIs work. But since so much of it it's happening client-side, I think they'd have to control the client to have complete control. This might be why youtube no longer works on Chrome when I have adblock plus, but it still works on Firefox for me.
I hate ads too, but I have noticed that a lot of people who absolutely hate ads and paywalls still expect free content to magically keep being produced for them. I mean, subscriptions or ads, those are really your only choices. People need to get paid, server fees need to be paid, etc. Shit ain't free. It's fair to complain that something is overpriced, but it's not really fair to complain that the content you want has to be monetized somehow.
If I want to pay creators I find their patreon / substack / etc., Youtube can die in fire. We don't even need them for hosting after bittorrent. The reason Google is shelling out all this cash for hosting isn't that they're hoping to make profit, it's that they're hoping to maintain control over the narrative.
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"If he dies, he dies."
I don't really consume news media these days, on account of it being such propagandist shit. Only occasionally encounter it when something is linked in an online politics discussion. I still get annoyed when I see a paywall and, yes, I do feel entitled to read it for free. To speak to the implied bluff calling here that wouldn't I deal with the ads if I had to? Shouldn't I appreciate the hard work that goes into the service? No. I wouldn't be sad at all if all news and journalists died due to lack ad money. It's already effectively dead to me. The world might have a hard time functioning without literally any journalism, but then I don't think that's a real threat right now, nor is it a me problem. There's very few ad supported "services" that I truly could not live without if push came to shove.
Do they though? Again to keep with the news example, I would say a fairly worthless bullshit job is massively oversaturated. Do we really need BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, etc., etc. all reporting on the same news bite thing happening? Yet they all want an individual slice. Maybe there should be a culling and some people don't deserve to be paid. And right now things are holding on due to cattle like normies and people willing to put up with the bullshit because of adblock. I might be willing to throw down some money to fund actual quality (which doesn't exist in journalism) if there were only a handful of real journalists informing the world and my contribution was genuinely needed, but that's not the real status quo.
Youtube, or rather the concept of video sharing/hosting, is one of the few ad supported things I genuinely want around for sure. But on this though I don't think it's as true as you say. Somehow they operated for years off normies without problem. MEGA and other services run without this ad aggression.
I also take issue with the sudden unexamined and selective Marxism that always shows its face in these arguments. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" Money isn't JUST going to pay to server hosting. It's going to Yachts, to DEI officers living in SF, to office yoga sessions. People always make this appeal about resources needing to go to core real labor or machine costs, but it's never the reality of funding. And if that were the true concern there would be more efficient ways to do it without all the dead weight.
Bandwidth is a semi-solved problem. Pirating operates with 0 ad revenue decentralized sharing, or standard ads with shifty websites. I pay for all the basic necessities to make it work (and more) with the my bills already.
Well, to be fair, I think the libertarian response to this would be that without the draw of nice things like yachts, no person would want to become a CEO in the first place. Whomever decided to make Youtube to begin with, it took a large investment with low chance of success, so there has to be significant upside for doing it.
The libertarian response would also be "adblock go brrrr!".
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I've counted on the fact that the average normie will keep watching enough ads that the service will be supported even if it never makes a dime off my attention.
And apparently the average normie's tolerance for ads, even intrusive/obnoxious ones, is way above mine, so I usually don't have the option to just accept a few minimally intrusive ads to toss a few pennies in the coffer. So yes, I end up being the classic case of a free rider.
Which actually leads to a very annoying equilibrium overall, I think. I would be generally happy to pay a premium for a geniune, no-bullshit, "we won't serve you any ads ever" subscription service.
But as we've seen with the history of basically everything else, no matter how much money they make off the subscribers, they can always squeeze a few extra pennies on the margins off if they can serve them ads in addition to taking their subscription money.
So there's constant pressure to find a way to get paying customers to tolerate ads, and thus ads seem to inevitably sneak into the system. And as mentioned before, normies seem extremely tolerant of this, so me, as a subscriber who DOES NOT want ads, am not strongly considered in the equation.
If the Schelling point is serving as many ads as possible, the only way I can possibly express my disagreement is to block ads on principle, it seems like. If they will move over to my preferred equilibrium where everyone is only served exactly as many ads as they're willing to tolerate, I'd change my tune.
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I've certainly got an OOM less disposable income than the modal Mottizen, but leaving frugality aside, I expect the marginal impact of my use of adblock to be negligible.
They're simply not common, I've seen various estimates for adoption, and they're all in the low single digits at the highest.I've seen estimates that YouTube adblocking is less than a percent, but a cursory search of the internet tells me overall adblock use is ~25%. I don't trust those figures, it doesn't jive with my personal observations at all, but I retract my initial claim.
I'm not claiming to be an "ethical pirate", but in general, I would never have purchased most of the media I pirate, and thus the impact to the producer is pretty much nil. And there have certainly been products that I've enjoyed to such an extent that I did buy them, even if it's because I decided the ease of having Steam mods or access to multiplayer was worth it, in the case of video games. That seems to me like the claim that piracy is a supply problem, which I partially endorse, because even YouTube premium is inferior to the experience when you have adblock and sponsor block in play.
Besides, Google gets money from me anyway, especially after they removed free storage on Photos.
I think you and @BurdensomeCountTheWhite have misunderstood my point. I don't care if y'all pirate or use adblockers or whatever. (I use adblockers myself, though I don't go out of my way in that particular arms race.) I'm saying a lot of people seem outraged that the people providing content want to make money from it. You can debate the worthiness of any individual creator or platform, and I also agree that I would prefer to give money directly to creators who produce work I like (and I do) rather than Google. The attitude I am addressing, however, is that "it's wrong for them to want to monetize, everything should be freeeeeee!"
For me it is in part "hopefully someone else will pay for it". Applies also to large part of Patreon-funded stuff.
I am volunteering for some stuff that is (in my opinion) strongly socially useful so I have no problem whatsoever with someone else funding providing of entertainment I like, and some evil corporation paying measly cents that costs them to host content I use. I also have no problem whatsoever with pirating music and videos, though I am taking effort to pay creators where possible.
It is more complicated than expected to pay artists and in some cases I found no way to do this. What I consider to not be a my problem, if someone has not bothered to sell their music as files then I will not pay for it.
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People created great content on YouTube before the era when they could make money on it. And, indeed, I think the monetization era has resulted in worse content:
And that's just the creator side. On the hosting side there's an army of programmers hell-bent on increasing engagement and ad revenue at any and all cost, from UI changes (removing the dislike button, making everything huge and eye-catching as opposed to information-dense), heavily prioritizing recent videos, playing very fast and loose with search query matching (it shows you results only faintly related to your query if they're extremely popular, because it calculates that you're more likely to click on it), prioritizing well-known and official channels in search results despite not matching your search query as well as a niche channel.
I'd literally pay to return to the pre-monetization YouTube era. I am so fucking disgusted whenever I have to use YouTube to find something (DIY, tech reviews, some old funny thing I saw and want to look up again, footage of some recent event in the news, etc.) I cannot overstate the despair, revulsion, bitterness, and disdain I harbor about how fucking shit YouTube (and essentially the entire internet, honestly) has become over the last decade or so.
This is it, yes. I don't feel like a sucker for paying for a service I use. I feel like a sucker for paying for a service that is continuously enshittified and can afford to do it because they have a virtual monopoly.
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I still don't understand why they removed the dislike button. Isn't it going to help to serve people better content overall, and thus keep them around the platform longer, if people can downvote bad content? The only reason I could see for them removing the dislike button is if people were using it for what Google would consider to be "hateful" or "harassment", which of course Google is likely usually trying to crack down on to promote a general "we're not the bad guy" image that comes from seeming outwardly progressive.
They would never admit it, but it to me it was obvious Youtube removed visible dislikes because of the regular stream of Big Brand(tm) videos getting publicly tanked and the headlines that came with it. Game sequels revealing they were taking directions unasked for, trailers for movies heavy on The Narrative or nakedly vacuous in their creativity, cringey White House videos - all them and more were a subject to a routine phenomenon where the faceless public (or at least an engaged subset) could throw a big ol' pie the faces of institutions both public and private whenever they did something painfully stupid or miscalculated. And the power in that was knowing that when you thought something was bad, you could be sure you were not alone.
Probably only takes some polite requests to Youtube's management to curb that. And like so much else lately, it can be justified under some bullshit about protecting the little guy from hate - even though I don't think I've heard a single creator big or small being supportive of it.
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We have an overabundance of content. I would prefer that people producing content did that because they enjoyed the process and not because they thought they could make a SaaS startup out of it or earn enough ad revenue to make a living.
Since geographical restrictions don't work (if I am a videoblogger in Utopia where I can work 20 hours a week in a grocery store and spend 20 hours videoblogging, but I also have to work 20 hours a week in a grocery store, it makes sense to me to move to the US if I am popular and start telling people how good NordVPN is instead of stacking shelves), making content creation generally unprofitable worldwide is a good Gideonic filter.
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Plus there's the whole thing about us writing ourselves out of existence by using ad blockers as far as advertising - and in turn everyone in power - is concerned.
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I see, and I can't say I disagree myself. Google is well within their rights to monetize YouTube, not that, rights aside, I'm not going to keep on circumventing it as long as it's feasible!
Hmm.. You'd think nation-states would attempt to host their own video sites, but I suppose the free market seems to be doing alright for most purposes.
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I refuse to pay or watch ads for Google specifically, because they have shown themselves to be ideologically opposed to me and prepared to devote their resources to removing and hiding things I agree with and want to watch or read. I do have direct paid subscriptions to several creators via Patreon and a paid subscription to Nebula where I watch videos that are interesting and not ideologically opposed to me, as they give their creators a significant direct cut.
It's pretty challenging to consistently and definitively refuse to give any form of support to these massive monopolies that have shown their dedication to squashing my ideology, but I do what I can, and I feel no qualms about cheating them and taking advantage of them any way that is convenient.
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Correct. I absolutely expect this. And why, I hear you ask? I reasonably expect this for the exact same reason a medieval lord could expect food to be provided to him by his peasants. End of story.
I don't know if you're being ironic or edgy or you think you sound like a chad or something, but you are not a medieval lord. You neither provide protection and security for content creators (the medieval lord's theoretical obligation in return for his provisions) nor do you have an army with which to go pillage them (the actual means by which they extracted it). So go on expecting whatever you want, it doesn't change the equation.
My taxes (and the taxes of the people like me) absolutely do provide protection and security for the rest of society. Now many of these content creators themselves are smart enough to themselves be in the group of people who produce net value and I agree they should be paid (the 6hr 1st Crusade link is absolutely amazing from the first 30 minutes or so that I've seen so far, the world is a better place for it existing), but we do have a way to pay for them, namely the taxes of me and the likes of me, which would be much better of being handed to these people for their time so they can create stuff like this rather than handing it out in housing benefit to keep poors living in expensive locations they couldn't otherwise afford (and thereby not only burning taxpayer cash but also causing a deadweight loss as high desirability accommodation close to high productivity centres gets consumed by low skilled people instead of those who can exploit such an envionment to the fullest).
It is not that I expect these people (specifically) to provide high quality content to me for free, it is more that I expect to be provided high quality content for free by virtue of my position in society and how much I contribute to it.
There effectively is an army which goes and pillages the likes of me for my taxes on threat of being jailed, and then freely celebrates this pillaging. All I ask is that it be equally turned on the lower classes when they protest, yet again, about wanting even more of the societal surplus generated by the productive being redirected to them, and then showing absolutely zero thanks for what they are given.
The point of my expectation is not in a hope that the world will change, I'm far too cynical for that, it's more for my own self to have zero moral pangs when I download and run more and more complicated scripts to keep on breaking anti-adblock. In the end if I have a device that I have full control over, there really isn't much YouTube or anyone else can do to control the exact content I see or that I don't see, they can only make my life hard, but not stop what I do on my own device.
The point is that when I do avoid ads I will not feel bad inside about depriving creators of their livelihoods, but rather feel good inside for asseting my control over my own device.
Here in the UK you are not allowed to turn left on a red light (the equivalent to right turn on red in the US), however back home where I am from it's permitted in certain locations, including my birthtown and its environs. When I am on my bike I freely turn left on red lights if it is safe to do so and do not feel bad about it at all, while not feeling the same way for breaking a light by going straight through. I basically consider it my birthright to turn left on red, something that is given to me by virtue of my birth and denied to the native brits purely based on where they were born (now they can change their law if they want to, and I think it would be sensible, but that's up to them).
To be honest with you I would freely turn left on red when driving as well were it not for the fact that cars have number plates and I'd get fined. So I don't do it. However I don't see this restriction as "yet another traffic rule" but rather as an undue and unfair restriction rather than a just law that has the "mandate of heaven". I see such a rule as being in the same class of rules that punish using a VPN in China. I wouldn't consider someone using one a "bad person", even though technically they broke the law, same here I would not consider a person that constantly turns left on red when safe to do so a bad person in a way that I would consider someone who breaks red lights to be bad.
However the British government does not have the bandwidth to stop all cyclists turning left on red (just like how China does not have the bandwidth to stop all VPNs), and so I freely do it, and when I do it I feel good about myself, because claiming what you are rightfully entitled to is not something to be ashamed of at all, but rather something to be proud of. If the government stopped fining cars that turned left on red I would start turning left on red as well, even though i the equivalent scenario where the government stopped fining cars that broke red lights by going striaght through I would not start going straight through. This is because I fundamentally believe I have an entitlement to turn left on red, while I have no such entitlements to run red lights. Whenever I turn left on red on my bike I feel good inside, but when I break red lights on red my internal moral compass tells me that I just did something wrong.
I have zero expectations that my belief and the beliefs of those who think like me make it at all any more likely that the government is likely to legalise left turns on red at all, but that's not the point of it, the point is for my own moral compass to see my actions as right and just vs wrong and a mere artifice. Same with my beliefs about what I am entitled to with online content, the point is for me to feel good and right and just as I apply the latest patch that continues to break whatever anti-adblock script YouTube et. al. are now pushing.
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I have deep aversion to paying Google, for multiple reasons. I would be far more likely to pay actual content creators, not middleman and infrastructure provider.
Interesting, I sort of grudgingly pay Google for infrastructure services (like fiber). I like their services there, and I'd be happy to pay that amount to most companies; it's that it's Google that bothers me, because I'm bothered by much of the rest of their business and politics.
I wonder if there are themes that we can connect to other topics. Maybe it's really the "middleman" role that people don't like. Though, I imagine this is connected to the general concern that, on the internet, middlemen tend to be successful due to network effects rather than making better products. Everyone goes to YouTube, because all the content is on YouTube, not necessarily because they built a better platform for distributing video. (Though, their platform is quite good at distributing video... save for all the ad annoyances.)
So, perhaps this is a bit of a hangover of the FOSS movement. If it's just a thing that performs a middleman function, people think that it could be mostly provided by a FOSS solution. I suspect that this intuition is mostly not wrong; it would be easy to have a FOSS solution that replaces YouTube. Wikipedia is similar here. One salient difference is that storing/hosting all that video is much more costly than storing/hosting Wikipedia. We just had the Elon-inspired hullabaloo about how much money is going to Wikipedia, so perhaps it's the same intuition.
Perhaps, then, setting aside one of the primary problems with FOSS (that the proprietary folks try super hard to make their products incompatible with FOSS solutions; see Microsoft trying desperately to "update" their file types to break Linux software), we could think about what "ideal" solutions to this problem could look like that comport with people's intuition.
I think everyone's happy to pay content providers in some way. And everyone is happy to pay for the storing/hosting costs in some way. The question is, "What is the right mechanism to get these prices paid without succumbing to huge monopoly rents of a network-entrenched middleman?"
One idea would be to break the trust into two different components. One component is only responsible for the base hosting of things, and the other is responsible for attaching ads to content. That is, all of the ad revenue would go to the creators and Company A, who selects which ads to show for which videos. Then, Company B would be responsible just for deliverying the content provided by Company A/creators to the end user. This would still leave the question of how to pay for Company B. Long ago, back in 2009 when YouTube was bleeding money, Slate estimated, YouTube's badwidth costs at about $360M/yr. Ignoring the licensing fees they cite (because hypothetical Company B won't have those), their top number was about $450M/yr. Back in 2009. It's certaintly more expensive now. Let's just say it's $500M-1B/yr, just for data storage/distribution. How do we actually figure out how to pay for that without stuffing Company B right back into the ad chain? Even the bloated amount of donations that go to Wikipedia wouldn't scratch the surface of that price tag.
For audio podcasts, competition can work really well and easily. The cost of storing/distributing just audio is far cheaper, so creators/folks like Company A could easily and cheaply be hosted on several different podcast apps. But with video, in order to have multiple competing storing/distribution companies, you'd either need to have all of them simultaneously dumping $500M-$1B/yr into storage/distribution, or more likely, the landscape would fracture into, "We're the storage/distribution company that has exclusive rights to Creators X, Y, and Z," that we're seeing with other streaming services. I'm not sure I'm actually seeing any good options.
As I sort of mentioned above, Google is no stranger to the idea of commoditizing your complement in order to make sure that it's not fucked/annoying to people enough to cause problems for your own business. That's the idea of Google Fiber. They're perfectly happy to run it as a very simple, no bullshit, fee-for-subscription model. They don't inject ads into the general traffic that comes into your house on the fiber. But the only folks with any sort of pull in the matter who would want to commoditize the storing/distributing complement would be the creators. Unfortunately, they're diffuse enough that it is hard to imagine them being able to come together and say, "Enough is enough. YouTube's pushing of ever more ads and taking bigger proportions are cutting into our share, too. We should band together, all contribute some amount to set up a true competitor that either doesn't have a subscription cost or has a minimial one, but which is foundationally committed to not adding ads beyond what the individual creator chooses to add.
This would probably start off looking like a worse proposition than YouTube to most creators. "You want me to handle my own ads and pay to have you host my content? Right now, YouTube automatically does the ad bullshit for me, and I just get a check, not write one." So, I imagine that significant capital would have to be risked to keep prices for them very low while independent ad companies could develop which "handle the ad component" for them. Would be very difficult to get off the ground.
Without, of course, just government anti-trust efforts decreeing that Google split up YouTube hosting/distributing in some way from the broader business. But I'm really not sure how exactly they'd be able to get a decree to work here either.
With Google I hate several of things they did. Mostly free software adjacent stuff, latest case is so called "web environment integrity" (and by integrity they mean that corporations can control how your browser behaves).
And they are simply overly large and overly powerful. I dislike idea of funding cyberpunk type dystopia, and fully blocking their ads and badgering is not taking much.
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Then turn that into a deep aversion to using their products.
I am not obligated to do this. I am using Youtube without Google ads and without paying and plan to continue it as long as my methods are working. Or until Google turns extremely evil.
I am also in process of migrating away one of services that become paid relatively recently.
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Why not propose to build our own internet while you're at it?
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I'm not complaining that content has to be monetized. But youtube did make it work for a long time with their existing model, so they must have been doing at least somewhat alright.
And there are ads that I'd be happy with, like non-video ads. @netstack mentioned a video-only adblocker, which I'd be happy with.
And lots of content creators I watch have sponsorship worked into the video. That's fine, too. But youtube's current solution is the most obtrusive and debilitating way of going about it, for all reasons I stated above and that others stated throughout this thread, that just about ruins the platform for me.
Google became the advertising behemoth it is today by creating an ad network that promised to be (and for a long time delivered on being) non-intrusive at a time when online advertising was getting extremely obnoxious. It's a bit disappointing to see them stoop to these practices now that they have no real competition, but such is the way of things. Maybe a new competitor will arise to take advantage of the situation like they once did.
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