I’d rather not use youtube than give them money for it or even sit through their intrusive ads. There are infinite ways to entertain myself.
I mean… that is the point.
Pay for premium, watch ads, or don’t watch at all. You and Google are both in agreement.
Yeah, I’m not sure I agree that YouTube wants their platform to shrink. Even if you don’t watch ads you are still giving them your data which they can monetize.
Personally I would be willing to pay for YouTube premium but not under the current terms. 1. If I’m paying for the service they should no longer collect and sell my data. 2. Allow me to have a YouTube-only account not connected to other Google services and 3. The current pricing is a bit high.
They can offer these terms or I’ll continue to use them logged out with Adblock. Or they can continue to enshitify and eventually their platform will start to shrink which will make the data they sell to advertisers less valuable.
Their platform won’t shrink. You and I may care enough to stop using it (very skeptical personally tbh) but 99.9999999999999999999999 percent of people don’t give a flying fuck and there’s more users being born every day.
I was actually offered by Google to separate my Google Services and their associated data from each other. I immediately took that offer, of course. Might just be an EU thing tho, idk.
That’d be well and good if they didn’t have a monopoly.
It’s not a pure monopoly by choice. While it’s true Youtube has a monopoly in terms of number of creators, viewers and content, it’s still not a profitable venture. I heard it was burning through money to keep up with the sheer amount of content they have to deal with. Youtube is doing all this monetization now because they have ran out of VC money and upper management decided that it needs to be self-sustaining. Even the obscene amount of data Alphabet is gathering from Youtube does not create enough revenue to generate profit. But it’s a “too-big-to-fail” product now so Alphabet will continue to invest. Competitors saw all of this and just noped out.
Other commercial video services, like Nebula, have popped up but they are subscription-oriented right from the get-go, like Netflix. This means they have a very small audience and it will take years to build up an audience like Youtube. So I don’t see them growing, at least in the near future.
This very much feels like disloyal competition. If you burn through your money in the hopes of sweeping out the competitors, and then you have to dial back on your competitor’s practices, it’s a dead giveaway you’ve done something fishy
they have ran out of VC money
You know YouTube is owned by Google, not VC firms right?
Big companies sometimes keep a division / subsidiary less profitable for a time for a strategic reason, and then tighten the screws.
They generally only do this if they believe it will eventually be profitable over the long term (or support another part of the strategy so it is profitable overall). Otherwise they would have sold / shut it down earlier - the plan is always going to be to profitable.
However, while an unprofitable business always means either a plan to tighten screws, or to sell it / shut it down, tightening screws doesn’t mean it is unprofitable. They always want to be more profitable, even if they already are.
I specified intrusive ads. They could have non-intrusive ads, like a little banner or something. Instead they put up multiple video ads before and during videos. No thanks.
Don’t forget after! Man I hate that when I have to sit through an ad if I don’t realize the video is all the way over yet, or I don’t change it in time
I use VPN on all my personal devices and 100% block all of Google but my work computer is either company VPN or straight “normal” Internet.
From time to time I have to check out YouTube from the work computer and since they’ve got no data on my home IP address, it’s wild seeing the content of the ads shift from irrelevant (non-targeted) from my home IP to highly targeted on the work VPN (it’s clear they target the demographics of my company).
I mean, it is great that you have very specific rules in terms of what kind of ads you will tolerate. You should write a letter to John Google about that.
But also? We have been through all this before. Back in the day, ads on websites were incredibly unobtrusive. A small png at the top of the page that everyone skimmed past. But people still wanted to block those because only the evil sites were sellouts who needed to pay for hosting and blah blah blah. Which more or less started the ad war we have going to today. First they were simple jpegs. Then they were animated gifs. Then they were annoying animated gifs. Then they became flash ads. Then they became flash ads about how this shitty age of empires ripoff totally has boobs. And so forth.
Because if people aren’t looking at ads? The people who buy ads know that. So we get ads that are harder to look away from. Until they are ads we can’t look away from because they are embedded in the videos themselves.
And, until we live in a post scarcity society where energy is infinite, it is going to cost money/resources to host web content. Ads are still the closest thing to an “effective” way to pay for a lot of that. And that means a war to have ads that get past ad blockers and ensure eyes get on them.
Not quite. Google doesn’t want competition or content creators to be elsewhere.
There is nowhere else. The only other companies that can consider a YouTube scale product already noped out.
There are free alternatives like odysee, but creators have no incentive to move there
A decentralized apporch: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube
I keep saying it. Privacy invasive, targeted advertising has got to be barely worth the cost of maintaining it. Why else is Google trying to put more ads in places, kill ad blockers on chrome, force expats out of subscriptions, and experiment with unskippable ads if not to try and invent some kind of additional value to advertisers out of nothing.
Because the investors/stockholders in the tech industry started tightening the belt and demanding profitability from these huge tech companies. What’s happening at Google is happening everywhere: the avenues for extracting more profit from their apps or services are being scoured and taken advantage of. Prices going up, advertising increasing, free features removed, etc. Different strategies all around, but the pattern is clear.
YouTube has never been profitable, but Google was ok with letting the rest of the profits from its other divisions subsidize YouTube’s losses so it could remain free. They did that to choke the market; no other company could handle the sheer scale of it while offering it for free. As long as Google ran YouTube for free with relatively few ads, no competition could ever possibly come to exist.
But because the shareholders are demanding profit now, and because Google itself is struggling on multiple fronts, the time to force YouTube into a profitable enterprise has come at last.
And this is what it looks like.
As for risking competition, at this point, I don’t think they care anymore. Competition in the web service and software space seems to be a thing of the past. Users are intransigent, algorithms favor the oldest and most popular services, and content creators seem to be incapable of separating themselves from their abusive platforms.
I also have a theory that Google is using YouTube as a way of rallying all platforms and services to combat ad blockers more fiercely. If they can beat them on YouTube, other sites will dig their heels in. There’s a long-term strategy here to nuke ad blocking permanently. That’s what that web environment integrity shit was about, and you better believe that will be back with a new name.
Enshittification
I have a very sinking feeling that websites will be streamed in the future (SHTTPS) and it will be pioneered by Google :'(
Man I knew something like this was going to happen. Just be glad Google doesn’t block your access to all their services or just outright delete your account. On the bright side, you’d be set free.
I’d have expected this to happen years ago.
NewPipe, no problems.
Tubular is better. It’s a fork of NewPipe with SponsorBlock built-in.
Is there an automated bot to archive channels from YouTube and upload them to Peertube?
If one does that, be prepared to defend yourself against the copyright infringement lawsuit that’s coming your way eventually.
Read my comment on doing it over TOR. If you have a trusty VPS, encrypt your LVM with LUKS and use that for scratch storage.
There are repos on GitHub that pull the videos and metadata, not sure about posting to Peerhub, though if that’s possible to post via an api you could probably script it easily enough. Likely a risk of other “issues” doing so, but I’m sure some datahoarders could chime in.
I’d run this on a VPS if I could do it over the TOR network (don’t want to get caught with my CC on the line), but there’s the problem of needless duplication if this happens, so it’s likely the best if relevant authors do it themselves
I always thought Invidious was downloading the source video from YouTube in the background when given a YouTube video ID and it’s not already downloaded, but I might be wrong.
What about renting a VPS itself over Tor using Monero, and then letting the VPS do its work normally in the clear?
Very expensive
So a person is not allowed to be part of their home country and get service and then move? What if their job stays the same and they don’t make any extra? Evil google.
They are perfectly free to do that. They just have to resubscribe from their new home country at the new rate. Just like with telephone service or cable tv. It’s not like they will get in trouble or would be prevented from moving.
deleted by creator
Operation costs differently in different regions. Advertising spend differs in different regions. You’ve moved from a region with cheap operating expenses and no ad spend to another region with more expensive operating expenses and higher ad spend. Congratulations on your move, now the cost to provide you service is different, and you’d need to pay more to cover the operating expenses + expected margin.
Alternatively, procure a local credit card (I.e. the same one you used back home), billing address (i.e the last place back home), and always do everything through a VPN back home. Then you’re at least using services from where the operating expense reflects the pricing.
This is just business, and should be expected. Food is dirt cheap back in Asia, they’re more expensive here in North America. Like it or not, if I’m living here, I need to pay the prices here. If I don’t want to pay the prices here, I can move back to Asia.
Except food is a physical good that needs to be transported, while the service is still provided by low wage workers from across the globe.
If a corporation gets to provide the service from where it’s cheaper, they can’t be mad people buy it from where it’s cheaper.
Service provider must acquire hardwares for the data centre at local vendor pricing.
Service provider must hire someone local to work in your local data centre.
Service providers need to pay local electricity and bandwidth rates.
List goes on. Just because you don’t interface with the local aspects of business doesn’t mean they don’t exist and add extra costs.
If you want to pay lower rate, as I stated earlier, make your narrative work: use local payment methods, billing address and use the service locally to the locality you’re paying in. Then they’ve got nothing to argue against you as you’re using services in that lower cost region.
Except the hardware is purchased using a global framework contract that uses the volume as a reason for deep discounts.
It gets put in a rack by a local guy and then remotely provisioned by some person from a low cost country.
Electricity in datacenters is purchased at wholesale prices and muchuch cheaper than what consumers pay…
The list goes on and on.The higher prices in countries has only very marginally to do with the higher costs.
Money grabbing corporations will charge what the market will bare.
Internet isn’t free. It takes copper or fiber cable, switching and routing equipment, labor to operate and install them, and electricity to run it all. Those costs are also lower in other countries.
So if you subscribe in a low-cost country, does it make sense for them to let you use the high-cost infrastructure?
It is just some Telcos that price for data usage and put in usage caps. But this is only a way to price gauge customers. In the EU most ISPs operate without datacaps and are much cheaper month to month than in the US (my 1gb symmetric fiber connection without datacaps costs around 30 euro per month).
Sure a data connection in a datacenter is more expensive, but is either shared across datacenter customers or a customer gets their own. And again, global players have framework contracts with other global players… so maybe Orange Business Services provides the internet connection for their DC operation globally.
The cost for the things they have to source locally is highly overestimated. Usually budgets they spend locally on stuff like advertising are much higher.
Okay? Just shoot yourself in the foot then.
Less reason to subscribe then!
You can use NewPipe or Tubular for Android
Also there is https://piped.video/trending for watching in browser and Revanced on Android
And for anyone using YouTube Music there is Desktop app for Linux,MacOS and Windows https://github.com/th-ch/youtube-music
LibreTube is also a good one. Basically an app for piped
I use to care, but then I just use Peertube. Oh but there’s not as much content on Peertube. Put the type of content you like on Peertube make a channel it is free. Another tip is, look for specific types of content, and not specific content creators. and if you happened to find a creator you know or knew, follow them on Peertube!
I have plenty of tech that keep me up to date on Peertube, and it’s a type of platform that will never have ads or go a direction I don’'t want it to as a whole in terms of federation of servers and being an opensource video platform.
Server can surely make some unwelcomed decisions, and I can just change servers easily. Better then Youtube no ads, and your experience does not get throttled.
Peertube is a crazy impressive piece of tech. Just like Lemmy and Mastodon, it needs something to happen to push users over to it (or something like it). YouTube keeps doing stupid things like this, so one day users will be pushed away from it and the creators will have to follow or die.
Its funny how we cant use VPNs but companies will go to the country with the lowest wages to get workers.
Makes sense and probably all companies that do regional pricing have a rule for this, Steam explicitly states to not do this as well
You agree that you will not use IP proxying or other methods to disguise the place of your residence, whether to circumvent geographical restrictions on game content, to order or purchase at pricing not applicable to your geography, or for any other purpose. If you do this, Valve may terminate your access to your Account.
I’ve never seen a company SO devoted to get me to not use their service. $2-$3 a month is worth not seeing ads in my mind. They’ve made their website SO user hostile and their prices are just too damned high to justify paying them - I can just go without.
If I could get Youtube Premium for $2-3, I’d probably pay. I don’t use it enough to justify spending $10 or whatever it is these days, so I block ads. If that stops working, I’ll stop watching Youtube.
I would even pay the 11,99€, in fact I did in the past. Youtube’s algorithms made me stop.
Spotify for example caters to my preferences. It took a bit to train it, but the weekly selection is spot on with lots of a variety, and they don’t try to shove pop music or other mainstream stuff into my face.
YouTube tries to suckme into a shit hole of craziness at every turn. It tries to make people dumber.
YouTube doesn’t want your money.
and other hilarious jokes you can tell yourself
They want you to pay a higher price but since you have a choice of paying nothing then the message seems clear to me. You can see comedians on there for free, they tell real jokes.
…whoosh
no u
