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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
A decentralized apporch: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube
There are free alternatives like odysee, but creators have no incentive to move there