Humanity accepts your challenge! See y’all on the battlefield ;-)
lights molotov cocktail
…
“are we not going to do that, or…? asking for a friend, of course”
That comes later but I like the energy.
We can do it the old fashioned way
Where is that image from?
A show called ‘The Good Place’. Good show imo.
Ah ok cool, thanks I watched I think the first season. Need to finish it.
But we fixed this already, it was called TiVo…
some people still recommend using a VPN and IP address from a country where YouTube ads are prohibited, such as Myanmar, Albania, or Uzbekistan.
Wait, you can just prohibit YouTube ads at a national level? That’s somehow awesome and terrifying at the same time.
That’s somehow awesome and terrifying at the same time.
The people of this country would find it just the normal thing.
What would be terrifying about it?
Yeah, I don’t see what’s terrifying. Countries can make laws, if YouTube wants to operate in that market it has to follow the laws there.
There seems to be an abundance of the false notion that large corporations are somehow above governments on Lemmy … and that’s simply not true, at least for corporations that want have legitimate business within the country.
EDIT: So as to say … perhaps the commenter (at least in the moment) was a bit awestruck seeing laws apply to tech (which often seems to feel as though it’s above the law in some way).
It kinda depends where. GDPR in the EU is certainly an example of governments imposing their will on corporations. In the US, not so much, as corporations dump tons of money on lobbying that allow to them influence how they are regulated.
Myanmar, as a country, has a GDP of 62.26 billion usd.
Google has a market cap of 2.17 Trillion usd and made a profit of $305 billion usd last year.
Google makes more money in profit than moves through Myanmar in a year by nearly 5 times. If Google chooses not to operate in their country because of some law they don’t like, what’s to stop them?
Google definitely has national government level influence, especially considering the pervasiveness of their product suite. Implying that they’re above the law might be too far, but they for sure influence it.
If the most extreme happens and Google decided that some EU law was too much to deal with compared to the gains, a lot of Europeans could find themselves in a position where Google doesn’t operate in their country. Imagine every Android device becoming unable to use the majority of the service they operate on, or the most common browser, search engine, email service, and video streaming services simultaneously being disabled. I can’t imagine the people will be very happy about that.
‘oh no youtube cant make advertisers money while putting kids in a far right conspiracy rabbit hole how scary’
Are these countries even safe to host a VPN server in?
Edit: Just checked my VPN (Proton) and it has options to connect to Myanmar and Albania. Nifty.
I’m wondering how the hell YouTube even makes money in those regions then. They must operate there at a massive loss.
Myanmar’s average internet speed looks to be around 10-20mbps, so they probably stream with lower quality. Their GDP per capita is ~$1,150, so ads being shown to people in Myanmar wouldn’t be worth much anyway.
This must cost YouTube a fortune doing additional processing and reduced flexibility. They are going to hurt themselves and blockers will find a way.
There’s already extensions that somehow skip sponsorship sections, so it won’t even take that long.
That’s “crowdsourced”, i.e. manually done by volunteers on per-video basis.
I see a good use case for AI, can also be crowd sourced.
It’s illegal to not identify an ad as an ad (unless you’re a movie maker, but that’s a different topic). All ad blockers need to do is read that indicator. That might not be super simple, but I have faith in the abilities of the brilliant people behind many ad-blocking technologies.
That’s actually hurt by this because it uses timestamps supplied by users to work. But now they are off because the ads are of variable length. We can just hope that YouTube keeps the ability to link to a specific timestamp because then it has to calculate the difference and that can be used by Sponsorblock and adblockers alike.
The problem is those blocking extensions are based on timestamps. Those timestamps are added by the users, it’s a crowdsourced thing. But the ads a single user will see differ from what another user will see. It’s likely the length of the ads is different, which makes the whole timestamp thing a no go.
Along with the timestamp, there needs to be a way to detect where the actual video begins. That way at least an offset can be applied and timestamps maintained, but it would introduce a certain level of error.
The next issue would be to then advance the video to the place where the actual video begins. This can be very hard, as it would need to include some way of recognizing the right frame in the buffer. One requirement is that the starting frame is actually in the buffer (with ads more than a few seconds, this isn’t guaranteed). The add-on has access to this buffer (depending on the platform, this isn’t guaranteed). And there’s a reliable way to recognize the right frame, given the different encoding en quality setups.
And this needs to be done cheap, so with as little as infrastructure as possible. A database of timestamps is very small and crowdsourcing those timestamps is relatively easy. But recognizing frames requires more data to be stored and crowdsourcing the right frame is a lot harder than a timestamp. If the infrastructure ends up being complex and big, someone needs to pay for that. I don’t know if donations alone would cut it. So you would need to play ads, which is exactly what you intend on not doing.
I’m sure the very smart and creative people working on these things will find a way. But it won’t be easy, so I don’t expect a solution very soon.
You need more data to recognize frames, but not a lot more data. A hash for each quality setting would be sufficient as long as they don’t start fuzzing the videos, which would be very expensive on their part.
Not really. They can precompute those and inject it in an MP4 file so long as the settings match and it’s inserted right before an i-frame so that it doesn’t corrupt b-frames. They already reencode everything with their preferred settings, so they only need to encode the ads for those same settings they already do. Just needs to be spliced seamlessly.
But YouTube uses DASH anyway, it’s like HLS, the stream is served in individual small chunks so it’s even easier because they just need to add chunks of ads where they can add mismatched video formats, for the same reason it’s able to seamlessly adjust the quality without any audio glitches.
Ad blockers will find a way.
Re-encoding is one thing, but ads are more or less supposed to be dynamic based on user location and likely some other data to target them.
Offloading that to the client made a lot of sense but now they have to do this server-side, they have very smart people working on making this as efficient as possible using tricks you’ve mentioned and more but it is still more effort than before. All for something that will likely be circumvented eventually.
All of that targeting data lives on Google’s servers already. Your computer isn’t trying to figure out who you are and what you like each ad play, Google already knows who you are when your browser makes a request for a video. Everything you are talking about is already server-side.
You can check the SponsorBlock FAQ about this. They do not need to do additional reprocessing
YouTube’s next move might make it virtually impossible to watch YouTube
How it works is that once you start getting these Server Side Ads (SSA), Youtube will create a sort of queue of videos in place of your usual video, with the first few being ads that can’t be skipped and have a red bar (not yellow) and in the end you’ll get your video. They are not literally part of the original video stream, they are separate streams that get injected as if they were the original video. It’s called SSAP, and I’ve been experiencing it from the last weekend. In the meantime, they’ve pretty much broken their player to implement this.
Ublock Origin has released a temporary fix yesterday here
Alternatively, you can use this extension to redirect from YouTube videos to piped.video I used it, it works very well, can’t guarantee for much more.
edit: fixed wording
Anything that makes it distinct gives a blocking opportunity, I assume?
Yeah, there’s ways around this. It’s just that most of the ublock origin blocking specific code, isn’t reusable here and the team will need to start over to deal with this new tactic/approach from Google.
The cure might eventually be worse than the disease though. If not now, or tomorrow, then the next day.
You could also use something like GrayJay, I’ve been using it for a while now and haven’t had any issues with it.
Google uses tax avoidance schemes and I use ad avoidance schemes.
My gut reaction is that this won’t work long-term. Users on youtube often point to specific timestamps in a video in comments or link to specific timestamps when sharing videos, meaning there needs to be some way to identify the timestamp excluding ads. And if there’s a way to do that there’s a way to detect ads.
Of course, there’s always the chance they just scrap these features despite how useful they are and how commonly they’re used; they’ve done similar before.
Feedback across the Firefox and YouTube subreddits highlighted that it could break timestamped video links and chapter markers. However, YouTube knows the length of the ads it would inject, and can offset subsequent timestamps suitably.
The move also adds a layer of unnecessary complexity in saving Premium viewers from these ads. If they are added server-side, the YouTube client would have to auto-skip them for Premium members, but that also means ad segment info will be relayed to the client, opening up a window of opportunity for ad blockers to use the same information meant for Premium subscribers and skip injected ads automatically.
It sounds like there’s a silver lining after all.
The ads won’t be baked in beforehand, they’ll be injected into the stream in real time. Videos are broken into chunks and sent over HTTP, they’ll just put ad chunks in during playback. There is no need to re-encode anything. If you deep link to a timestamp, the video just starts from that timestamp as normal. If you are a Premium user, the server just never injects the ads.
But you are correct that the client needs to be aware that ads are happening, so they can be indicated on screen, and so click-throughs are activated.
This is why Chrome went to Manifest v3 - so you can’t have any code looking for ad signals running on the page to try to counter it.
But you are correct
That’s what the article says, not me! lol
Surely at the server side it knows the premium status or the user it is supplying the video to, so just wouldn’t insert the ads? I don’t see why that would need to be client side.
YT already scrapped (or broke) setting the start/end timestamps for embedded videos. That hasn’t worked for at least the last few weeks. Embed videos now always start at 0
I embedded a video yesterday with a start timestamp and it worked
Did they change the params or something?
I have YT embed support in Tesseract, and videos with timestamps broke a few weeks ago (they all start at 0 now). I’ve tried both
t=andstart=formats: neither worked.You can still link to the YT video directly with those, though, but I’ve been unable to get embeds to honor them.
I’m prette sure they have to send the metadata to the client where an ad starts and ends. Just to make the ad clickable.
Timestamps can be calculated on the server, but maybe there will be an api endpoint that can be abused to search for the ads.
I don’t see any technical specification in the article, but if they inject the ad at the start of the video, making it part of the video itself, would make possible to just skip it using video controls. To avoid user skippin ad thru video controls there should be client-side script blocking it, so an ad-blocker can use this to tell apart an ad from the video itself.
Can anyone correct me on this?
Also, would this affect piped and invidious too?
I believe this describes them altering the ad host at load time for the page. DNS blocking of ad serving hosts only work if the hostname stays predictable, so just having dynamically named hosts that change in the loading of the page would make blocking more difficult.
Example: 1234.youtube-ads.com is blocked by AdBlockerX. 5678.youtube-ads-xyz.com is not on the blocklist, so is let through. All they have to do is cycle host or domain names to beat DNS blocking for the most part.
Previously, injecting hostnames live for EACH page load had two big issues:
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DNS propagation is SLOW. Creating a new host or domain and having it live globally on multiple root servers can take hours, sometimes days.
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Live form injection of something like this takes compute, and is normally set as part of a static template.
They’re just banking on making more money from increased ad revenue to offset the technical challenges of doing this, and offsetting the extra cost of compute. They’re also betting that the free adblocking tools will not spend the extra effort to constantly update and ship blocklist changes with updated hosts. I guarantee some simple logic will be able to beat this with client-side blocklist updating though (ie: tool to read the page code and block ad hosts). It’ll be tricky, probably have some false positives here and there, but effective.
As long as the naming pattern is distinct from important domains you can still block it based on pattern matching. They need to obfuscate ad domains and other hosting domains the same way.
Creating subdomains is quite fast because the request goes right through when it’s unknown to caches, it’s updates when you reuse existing ones that causes trouble with lag.
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That sounds correct for me. It is possible for them to switch to a system where everyone can manually skip past the ad in the video stream but adblockers are useless (by not sending and indication of the ad to the client), but I don’t see that happening since most people don’t use adblockers and letting all of them easily skip past every ad is probably bad for profits.
There’s already addons that can recognize in-video sponsored content and skip, if youtube splices in ads into the video stream these addons will still work (although depending on how strict server side logic is, they may have to pause when the buffer runs out until the time of the ad length has passed)
It’s not literally part of the video, exactly because of what you describe. They are separate streams that get injected into the player before the normal video. You can’t skip them or interact with them in any way (pretty sure it also breaks any purchase links etc). Piped or Invidious don’t have them, ytdl also doesn’t download them.
As of now, afaik, you won’t see them if your account wasn’t selected for the experiment, if you are in incognito mode (with uBO on) or if you have uBlock Origin (and other adblockers) off (you’ll see the normal ads and then the video).
How does this actually works? Can you point me to technical documentation about this?
I’ve only found info about SSAI, not about SSAP. Is it the same?
It’s probably going to be like twitch. I’m sure they’ll eventually succeed in making it so you can stream videos without watching ads but they’ll never be able to stop people from downloading the video and skipping the ad in vlc.
Honestly it would be trivial for them to make the video controls server side too and simply not accept fast forward commands from the client during the ad.
We might be in a “Download and edit to watch ad-free” world with this change.
Seems too much, really. Even if they do such a terrible thing, would they not expose a “report ad” or “see the product” buttons? Video buffer is still locally downloaded.
I’ll be curious to see where this ends up going, as I doubt the community will take this lying down.
The few times I’ve had to go without an Ad blocker, I’ve seen just how bad the Ads have gotten - they’re almost the same as regular TV Ad breaks now! … And then YouTube Premium is just not a good deal in my eyes, £12.99 a month is an awful lot to pay just to not see Ads.
Ads will probably stop me from watching YouTube completely. The huge surge of ads at some point was what stopped me from using Instagram.
Unstoppable ads are what stopped m from using twitch.
The occasional times I need to use Twitch I either VPN to Romania or use S0undTV.
The majority of of people using it will most definitely take it lying down as they’re most likely not tech savvy enough to install a browser extension on a laptop if the only thing on the page was a large red install button.
That’s why I specified the community, as in the more tech savy folks that would care about this, because I know that the wider public is surprisingly tech illiterate
And then YouTube Premium is just not a good deal in my eyes, £12.99 a month is an awful lot to pay just to not see Ads.
I think this includes YouTube music (at least in my market it does) which makes it fairly good value for money if you already subscribe to a music streaming app.
Oh, bundling. I thought societies were pleased to get rid of cable bundling, why is it coming back?
Because Netflix didn’t dismantle the capitalism machine.
Capitalism can never fully disrupt itself. It’s always cyclical. If bundling eventually made it more money, then it will eventually return. If the response to that is to innovate something that gets around that form of bundling, then that “disrupts” the market, in the short term, only for the market to settle back to bundles.
Because as long as the idea makes more money in a capitalistic society, it will never die.
But you can listen to YouTube music for free too, no?
I think so, but with ads just like the free tier of Spotify.
Does Ublock Origin not work for it anymore? And for phones, there are alternative apps - I use InnerTune.
I use ublock on my phone as well. I set it up to play through FF and never access the YouTube app. Did it for my gf when she complained of ads, and then did it for my self it was so easy.
I don’t remember the last time I saw an ad between us.
I don’t watch YT from phone much, but I find Newpipe for videos to be a better experience than browser (it is also much lighter). And similarly Innertune for music.
Lol right!
You’re not paying to not see ads. You’re paying for the content on the platform. You can pay either by watching ads or by paying for premium.
Content creators get nothing from a subscription To YouTube premium.
You’re not paying for the content, you’re paying for and-free access to the content.
This is not true, creators get paid for Premium user views.
Content creators get nothing from a subscription To YouTube premium.
This is not true. If you’re a free user they’re getting a share of the ad-revenue. If you’re a premium user they’re getting share of the membership fee. The more videos you watch from a creator the more they earn.
Also. Do you have any idea how expensive it is to run a video hosting platform? Especially at the scale of YouTube. There’s a good reason Lemmy doesn’t have videos.
It is expensive, but it’s hard to quantify that expense for a cloud provider like Google. They’re liable to use their market prices for cloud services to justify the “cost” when they want to make it look more expensive than it is. They’re already building a cdn for all their other services as well, so YouTube’s cost is baked into that.
Reddit, by comparison actually pays for cloud hosting for all it’s video services and so pays out the ass.
TIL I should be posting hundreds of AI-generated long form video essays to reddit.
Serving the videos is where they really get hit, not necessarily storing them.
Well, damn, there goes that idea.
There’s a good reason Lemmy doesn’t have videos.
peertube exists. it’s activitypub. lemmy is the reddit-like interface to activitypub. but the fediverse definitely has video. it even has live streaming through OwnCast (though i think peertube has livestreaming scheduled to be implemented as well)
edit: hey i just found a movie station!
I’m not informed enough to know how peertube works but running it is not free either. Nor is running a lemmy instance. Lemm.ee for example has a limit even on the size of images you can upload despite the fact that hosting images is orders of magnitude less bandwith and storage requiring than videos.
peertube uses webtorrents to share bandwidth among users: if you’re watching a video, you share the data to other users at the same time.
despite the fact that hosting images is orders of magnitude less bandwith and storage requiring than videos.
In general, yes, when comparing images/video of the same resolution. But if I compare an 8k image to a low quality video with low FPS, I can easily get a few minutes worth of video compared to that one picture.
As you said, it definitely costs money to keep these services running. What’s also important is how well they are able to compress the video/images into a smaller size without losing out on too much quality.
Additionally, with the way ML models have made their way into frame generation (such as DLSS) I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing a new compressed format that removes frames from a video (if they haven’t started doing it already).
I don’t care. I don’t wanna watch ads, ever. The point is, YouTube will never be able to stop ad blockers. They can try, and the only ones who get hurt on the content creators.
Edit: and whining, “boo-hoo for the trillion dollar megacorp!” Isn’t going to elicit any sympathies
They get money from premium views. I believe they get significantly more per premium views than an add view.
This is true, no matter what ElevethHour and their downvote brigade want you to believe.
They get the most money by just donating trivial amounts to their Patreon. That should be the standard. I assure you $5 one time to a creator is more than they’d ever make off you with Ad revenue.
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That is prone to error, just a pixel can be too small of a sample. I would prefer something with hashes, just a sha1sum every 5 seconds of the current frame. It can be computed while buffering videos and wait until the ad is over to splice the correct region
The problem with (good) hashes is that when you change the input even slightly (maybe a different compression algorithm is used), the hash changes drastically
Yes, that’s why I’m proposing it as opposed to just one pixel to differentiate between ad and video. Youtube videos are already separated in sections, just add some metadata with a hash to every one.
I think that downsizing the scene to like 8x8 pixels (so basically taking the average color of multiple sections of the scene) would mostly work. In order to be undetected, the ad would have to match (at least be close to) the average color of each section, which would be difficult in my opinion: you would need to alter each ad for each video timestamp individually.
Yes, that could be an alternative to computing hashes, I don’t know what option would be less resource intensive
Imagine thinking they can’t detect when you try to skip forward during an ad.
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I am excited. This will break my YouTube addiction.
It’ll only affect me when I need to fix something I’m unfamiliar with, and it’llead creators to using other platforms for that kind of material, and lower the barrier to entry.
I don’t know why Google is shooting themselves in the foot like this. I mean, it’ll be profitable in the short run, yes, but this will almost certainly be devastating to their bottom line in the long run if it works as planned.
The day I’m forced to watch YouTube ads is the day I’ll stop using it.
Have you looked at the Unhooked extension. You can choose to hide recommended videos, which was a game changer for me.
Disabling my watch history did the trick lol
YouTube’s recommendations are such absolute trash if you turn that off (I’m assuming intentionally, to get you to enable it).
And once everybody is watching ads and nobody is skipping them, YouTube will start making the commercials shorter and less invasive, right Anakin?
They just escalated the arms race between ad and ad blocker. All this could have been avoided if they actually did something about the scam ads.
No, it could not have been avoided. I don’t watch ads. Ads don’t need to be “scam ads” for me to not watch them. I just don’t. Full stop.
Bingo
So, how will content creators be reimbursed for the long hours they put into creating YouTube videos? There are honest people out there who made content creation their job. I say that to express I’m not talking about content farms, clickbait creators or “Mr. Beast” types - those are all media companies, although they also have bills to pay.
Did you get a premium account?
I love this mentality. This idea that forcing someone who hates ads to watch a bunch of ads somehow magically makes more wealth happen. The whole thing is a bubble desperately trying not to burst by basically forcing more ads in more places where it actually makes very little difference.
I wonder if creators are actually going to get paid any better if YouTube forces more people to watch ads on their channels. My bet is not.
Creators do get paid a share of the ad impressions. Many also are completely open about it and post videos of how well their videos did and how much money they earned from monetized videos, i. e. videos with ads - this is also why you hear many avoiding e. g. swear words, since YT’s auto detection will then flag their video for de-monetization.
But funny enough, that’s not what I said at all. The cost of running YouTube and the cost of the creators must be paid (plus creating an incentive to produce high quality content in the first place). That can be achieved by ads or by offering a subscription.
My original question still stands: if you were to build a video streaming platform tomorrow, what would your model for financing operation and content creation be?
Do adblocked videos prevent creators from having another view registered for a monetized video?
I don’t know how to do a video platform. If I had the time and skill, I’d rather make a FOSS, federated platform for creators/studios to host and finance however they want. Odds are they would never be as egregious as YouTube is being, and I’d be less inclined to skip their ads.
Individually, no. But each view not generating ad revenue does still generate streaming costs. If no one would pay Google to host their ads on YT, I doubt they’d keep the platform online.
Now don’t get me wrong, the threshold at which Google decides that the ratio of adblocked to regular viewers is exceeding their business model is most likely based on corporate greed, and the recent crackdowns on ad blocking are due to the same reason. I think they’re doing fine and there is no need for the recent initiative - but it would be equally dishonest claiming running a platform the size and outreach of YouTube could be done without large investments, one way or the other.
Ad-revenue is literally how content creators get paid. If you’re using an adblocker (like me) then you’re freeriding. They’re not getting any money from us viewing their videos.
Nobody is forcing anyone to watch ads. That’s the alternative available to people who don’t want to pay. The other alternative is premium membership. Which ever you choose makes money for the creators. Blocking ads doesn’t.
I hate ads just as much as the next guy but this mentality of expecting to get content for free is ridiculous. That’s unbelieveably narrow sighted and self-centered thinking. If subscribtion based business model was the norm instead of ads-based then we’d have none of the issues that come with targeted advertising. On the other hand if one thinks google is evil company and don’t want to give them money then stop using their products. Damn hypocrites…
Ad-revenue is literally how content creators get paid
Great. If YouTube removes viewers’ abilities to block ads, resulting in more ads watched, will content creators get an increase in pay?
Again, I doubt it.
I hate ads just as much as the next guy but this mentality of expecting to get content for free is ridiculous. That’s unbelieveably narrow sighted and self-centered thinking
You’ve missed the whole point. Ads exist to encourage people to spend money on products, therefore companies profit from paying for advertisements.
Where does the profit come from if someone who doesn’t deal with ads is forced to watch an ad? Do you think that person is just going to decide to spend money?
Secondly, if a creator adds a 1-2m sequence in their video to talk about a sponsor, no one is tracked, no one knows any better if uninterested viewers skip past it, and it’s usually very relevant to that creator’s target audience. I have zero qualms with such a system, and sometimes it’s actually really entertaining.
Morals or not, this is Google scraping at the bottom of the barrel to invent value where there is very little to be had. Data-invasive, targeted advertising needs to die.
No. They make money if they find a sponsor. I also skip over those sponsors’ ads but the sponsors don’t know that or they accept a certain fraction of people not watching their ads. I just don’t watch ads. If, in the future, that means I cannot watch my favourite tubers’ content, well too bad, I’ll watch some ad-free netflix series or read a book or whatever. But one thing is certain: I’ll rather light my dick on fire than watching ads. I even joined a class action lawsuit against amazon because they want to make me watch ads without my consent.
But if you’re paying for Netflix, why wouldn’t you simply pay for a premium account that doesn’t show you the ads? Is the content from your favorite YouTubers really that bad in comparison? I’ll admit, for me, it’s absolutely the opposite.
Most content creators don’t make money from ads. Google keeps on changing the rules to be able to monitize or keep monitizing their own videos. Google has put ads on videos when the creator did not reach the requirements to make money on ads.
This is why creators have sponsorahips, affliate links, their own merch, Patreon, or OnlyFans. They also use Youtube more as an ad platform for their other social media accounts like Instagram and Tiktok. Depending on the content some creators get paid more on Tiktok.
Yeah, if you listen to any content creator talk about sponsorship revenues it basically eclipses all other form of revenue for them.
I think it was Pokimane who got tired of people donating money and then being assholes if she wasn’t basically gushing over them for hours, so she just went “You know what, I don’t actually need your Twitch dontations.” and just turned them off.
Content creators make thousands of dollars per sponsorship deal minimum if they have a decent amount of viewers. Bigger creators like Ludwig get millions for some deals (Redbull gives him a crapload of money for product placement, for example).
The examples you cited are not individuals. Both Pokimane and Ludwig are basically media companies at this point in time.
And yes, the amount of money you get from YouTube is a lot less, although I’m being told major YouTubers have direct platform deals. But that’s not the issue:
In order to even get those lucrative sponsorships, you need the reach of a major platform in order to build an audience - that’s not happening without e. g. YouTube.
Yeah, but content creators haven’t deplatformed off YouTube. The closest might be streaming services like Nebula, but even those have subscriptions.
YouTube pays little to content creators for hosting the content, but they also pay for hosting the content. I can’t think of a case where content creators would pay to host their videos for others to watch for free without ads or a subscription.
What’s most valuable to Google is the user data. Google is still able to get a lot of user data even if blockers are on. Ads are really just a way to get even more data. If you click an ad 10 times and buy something just 1 time, that information is more valuable than the ability to put ads in front of you.
What good is user data if you don’t use it for advertising?
I said one was more valuable. That doesn’t mean they don’t go well together.
Anyway you can use data to nudge users. For example, Google can change search result orders. They can promote one company/research/ideology/party to the top and demote others.
Finding out where certain people are important for law enforcement or press.
Stores give out free wifi to track your MAC address and see where you go in stores. They sell this data, use it to track theives, or use it for better product placement.
No everything has to be for profit in this life.
I’ve no contract with them, I’ve not made any purchases. They post something online for anyone to see.
They are completely free of locking their content behind a paywall, there are plenty of platforms for that.
But I want to make my first statement clear: no every single thing any human being does has to be done just for the sole purpose of getting an economical profit. That would be the death of humanity.
I still remember 90s internet when we had tons of websites with lots of content that was just there because the creators were fans of such content, no further intentions. Barely any ads or monetization whatsoever. The ‘shark’ mentality is killing internet.
Sure. But nobody had to invest multiple hours each day into maintaining their Geocities page - there are only so many animated GIFs you could load over a modem connection anyway. Also, are we really comparing the hosting expenses of fucking YouTube with static 90s fan pages?
People expect edited videos from content creators these days. Even someone filming a hobby in their home shop will get barked at for having bad audio quality, if, this week for once, they forgot to charge the batteries on their wireless Rode lavalier mic.
That’s why so many content creators do have e. g. Patreon. Many of them are providing peeks behind the scenes and create transparency to show how much effort a single video takes, and even individuals often hire someone to do the video edits for them.
If you’re fine watching unedited, 5-10 minute videos that can be churned out with next to no effort, all good. I’m really into 40-90 minute long videos and personally view YouTube as an alternative to obtain the content type I prefer, but I’d rather not sacrifice quality. I also prefer creators who provide a serialized format and upload a video every week - in that way, I guess I’m old fashioned.
This type of content is impossible to make without financial support, which I’ll gladly provide one way or the other. However, how much the average person can afford in terms of monthly subscription fees is certainly limited, so a company offering access to multiple creators for a flat subscription fee is absolutely reasonable.
People expect edited videos from content creators these days.
They do not, look how popular meme compilation are.
Even someone filming a hobby in their home shop will get barked at for having bad audio quality, if, this week for once, they forgot to charge the batteries on their wireless Rode lavalier mic.
Hater will hate, welcome to the internet.
If you’re fine watching unedited, 5-10 minute videos that can be churned out with next to no effort, all good. I’m really into 40-90 minute long videos and personally view YouTube as an alternative to obtain the content type I prefer, but I’d rather not sacrifice quality.
This type of content is impossible to make without financial support,
Also, are we really comparing the hosting expenses of fucking YouTube with static 90s fan pages?
There were much edited 40-90 minute video before there were ad on youtube. There were high quality page long essay on internet before youtube exist. Do not need ad or revenue or money support to get your content.
In 90s people did thing because passion. Now because passion and money. Still can make thing only because passion, never got impossible.
Content creators should move to a platform that isn’t pushing far-right radicalization to kids watching video game streamers if they’d like me to pay for a premium account.
Should you then in turn also not consume content on YouTube at all? If so, great, you’re basically not affected by this discussion at all.
As for the topic itself: YouTube definitely has its share of problems, e. g. ElsaGate, unskippable ads in front of emergency medical advice, automated copyright strikes that are incredibly easy to abuse etc., but all those things are completely off topic.
Why are the things people are paying YouTube for not on topic when discussing payments to YouTube?
Patreon, Nebula, ko-fi, etc.
How does the hosting provider for the actual content benefit from the Patreon accounts of the creators?
Hence, Nebula.
That is - political topics aside - the same as getting a YouTube subscription.
I’d still prefer a platform run by content creators, naturally, so I fully support Nebula.
In one case I would be paying the platform in order to support the creator. In the other case, I am paying the creator to support the platform
I think the unskippable and autoplaying ads are the point for me where I start actively finding ways to avoid ads. Anything that tries to force itself in front of my eyes or eclipses the actual content is kind of a no go.
It’s not that Youtube creators don’t deserve to be compensated (many if whom provide content to YT for free just to share, let’s remember) it’s that Google needs to find less obnoxious means of serving ads.
I’d be really curious to see the actual numbers of how much Google gets in revenue from YT and how much actually goes to paying creators. I’m betting the ratio is not as slim as they make it sound.
I really don’t care, most YouTubers I watch use Patreon and Twitch subscriptions for the bulk of their finances, think they buy candy with the pennies YouTube sends them.
I occasionally buy merch from them, that’s my support.
I use an adblocker, but I watch sponsored segments from the creator, we know they earn money from those and they are often relevant to the channel
I’ve seen people who make money from YouTube, and I’ve no interest in seeing them continue to get paid. If somebody actually makes something worth paying for, they can take their shit to Netflix or whoever. They aren’t going to pay some manchild to yell at videogames all day.
I have seen plenty of people who make excellent content and who I’d consider to be decent human beings. I also used to believe that YouTube was a cesspool hosting only crap, and I think it was via some new hobbies that I discovered the decent offerings.
That by the way is why I explicitly mentioned channels and personalities I’d like to exclude from my claim that creators that should receive financial support to be able to keep creating content.
I already barely watch YouTube. It’s mostly for music videos. Google can fuck itself to death.
I sort of spent a decade uploading and streaming to it, started before it was even bought by Google, so I’ve really dug myself a pit at this point.
What do you propose Google do instead? Run YouTube at a loss?
First, individually targeted advertisement should be illegal. Instead of trying to figure out who I am and serving me ads based on that, they should only be able to look at server side facts. What is the video? This is how television and radio ads have worked for ages. You have a video about SomePopBand, you advertise concert tickets. You have a video about bikes, you advertise bike stuff. You don’t know who I am. Suddenly, the motivation for most of the privacy invading, stalking, nonsense is gutted.
Some people would still block those static ads. If they showed some restraint, I think more people would accept them. But that’s a sad joke- no profit driven org is going to show restraint.
Secondly, if they can’t ethically run the business at a profit, the business probably doesn’t deserve to exist. That or it’s a loss leader to get people into the ecosystem.
You do know you can enter into your Google settings and disable all tracking and targeting, right? And you can ask them to delete all information they already hold on you.
Yes. However, it’s an assumption they honor those requests and don’t try to track you anyway.
Plus Google isn’t the only company trying to do individualized targeted advertising.
Google is operating at a 24% net profit margin. They don’t need to get their shareholders more money…
Do you actually understand how this works? It’s a beautiful statement and oh so noble, but it just flies against how the world really works.
At some point, maybe not today, but at some point, you’re going to be saving up for your retirement. Your money will be invested; either passively or actively. If active, a fund manager (or maybe even yourself) will be spending time, every single day, wondering how to maximise the invested cash. If passive, you’re letting a WHOLE lot of fund managers make the decisions for you (wisdom of the crowd). Either way, Google better fucking perform or the investors will go elsewhere.
And you’ll be an investor too, asking for Google to do better than anyone else or you’ll take your savings elsewhere.
If investors go elsewhere then they’re trading for a higher risk and return ratio than a massive company with rich history like Google. Plus, it frequently performs large buybacks and offers, and even offered a dividend recently. There is always going to be something attractive to investors, here.
One thing I genuinely don’t get: why does a company making this much money need “investors”? (Other than participating in the make-rich-people-richer scheme)
Youtube doesn’t pay attention to what ads get approved, or where they get served. Ive heard stories of people getting served two hours full amateur movies as ads, Ive heard of people getting soft core porn served as an ad, to actual scams and crypto pitches. It’s like Facebooks new AI enabled algorithm. There is actual danger, considering children and the elderly get sucked in to youtubes black hole?
I watched a couple videos on the Diddy case, and a couple days later my whole feed was filled with the worst conspiracy theories and Christian preachers.
I watch one Youtuber talking about pyramids, YouTube fills my whole suggestions with ancient alien conspiracies.
I watched one cover of a song, I get recommended the same song for weeks.
I watch one reaction video, the whole feed turns into reaction videos within minutes.
It’s a fight against the algorhytm and it isn’t fun. It’s incredible how dumb it is after all these years, and those algprhythms are partly to blame that everyone feels more miserable than they are.
I mean, yeah. It did so for years.
Yes right. But what does the investor environment look like today? Profit, not users, is what everyone is counting. If Google says “we’re burning cash in all businesses but search, but hey we’re nice”, investors will take their investments to more profitable businesses.
They actually have a pretty huge net profit margin and what basically amounts to a monopoly on advertisement, so even if their ads reached less intended targets it wouldn’t hurt their bottom line much.
Didn’t you know? It’s doesn’t matter that they’re still making billions more than they ever made, numbers have to go higher.
Make a fair payment model. No classic subscription. But pay per watched minute, and when you hit a certain amount of minutes, every additional minute is free.
People will find a way to get around it, I could see buffering a video for 5 mins or even downloading the entire video ala locally playing podcasts, then using AI or some type of frame analyzation technique t to skip ads. Or just skip them like good old fashion Tivo from your player.
TBH I don’t expect AI to be able to solve this.
Freetube has a sponsor skip feature, skips sponsored sections of videos automatically, so it looks like this has already been solved
server side video ad injection means they could vary the placement of the ad, so things like sponsorblock which relies on the segment being in the exact same place all the time would not be very effective
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