•  dan   ( @dan@upvote.au ) 
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        49 months ago

        It’s likely they don’t have much of a choice as a business. The more people use ad blockers, the more ads they need to show to make up for the loss in revenue.

          • Paying for Premium is another option. I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but to a creator a view from one Premium subscriber is worth much more that hundreds of views from ad-supported free tier subs. It’s the next best option outside of direct payment (Patreon, GoFundMe, etc.)

            If content from these creators is really important to you and you spend a lot of time on YouTube, maybe a monthly sub is actually worth it.

            •  dan   ( @dan@upvote.au ) 
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              9 months ago

              Yeah I don’t understand why people think they deserve good content for free? Either you pay for it through ads, or you pay for it through money (or you pay for it through either licensing fees or taxes, like the Australian ABC and British BBC). Producing and hosting videos are both pretty expensive, and YouTube’s not a charity.

              The reason there’s no major competitors to YouTube is that nobody else can afford it at a scale anywhere near what YouTube does - most companies couldn’t afford to run a service 1/10 the size even.

          •  Syrup   ( @Syrup@lemmy.cafe ) 
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            49 months ago

            Yep. I doubt there were that many people using adblockers back when you only had one skippable 15 second ad at the beginning of a video. But when you have 1-2 ads every 10 minutes, on top off all the premium popups, it’s just unbearable.

          • I was pretty tolerant of YouTube ads up until a year ago, when they started playing unskippable food ads which I morally disagree with. No amount of “not relevant” made them go away so I’m hardcore ad-free now. I even tried YouTube premium until they decided to jack up the price on my second month of having it, so fuck em

          •  dan   ( @dan@upvote.au ) 
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            39 months ago

            Yeah, it’s a bit of a cycle. If it continues, they’ll likely find new ways to make ads harder to block. For example, embedding the ads directly into the same video stream as the actual video and using DRM. I have no doubt they’ve already prototyped or even fully built out solutions like this, waiting to roll out if/when they’re needed.

        • Youtube never was a especially profitable business on it’s own, they basically just need it for the traffic but I guess they might try to change that, if that’s the case the logical next step would be dropping independent creators! :/

    • I’m old enough to remember when none of this stuff existed. I have a threshold Beyond which I simply stop using the service.

      I’m actually pretty close to my lifestyle from before 1995. I don’t have any cable I have basic internet I don’t do any of the Music Services. Video-wise I only have Prime and any free services I can get on Chromecast for TV. I’m getting close to my threshold with prime, as the annual fee is getting real high.

      I’m already starting to lose interest in most YouTube channels. It’s not so bad here, really. I get to experience reality more.

    • Check out PeerTube.

      Smart content creators have been setting up websites, Patreons, merchandise shops, and all they need to jump ship when YouTube finally capsizes. The likely/easy/inexpensive alternative for content creators, is PeerTube.

    • Tempted to looking in to self hosting video content, it’s a real storage hog, but if compressed, I imagine some of the mid sized youtube channels could afford to do so, the real shame will be the difficulty for smaller creators to get discovered without a common platform.

      • The problem isn’t storing it, it’s hosting and delivering content.

        YouTube, Netflix, and all the other big streaming platforms have huge amounts of servers around the world delivering content with minimal latency and without saturating the Internet exchanges with gigantic amounts of data traffic.

        If we were to do this peer-2-peer people would have to get used to waiting for pages and videos to load again.

        • So long as the video runs continuously once the page loads, I’m not particularly bothered by latency. Admittedly I’m not everyone, but I think most people care more about the content than the UX. I mean, hell, YouTube has a pretty miserable UX in different ways, not from lack skill on the part of the people who make and maintain it or limitations of technology, but from the poor cooperate incentives and goals that govern it.

          • It probably wouldn’t. Or you would have to wait a long time.

            Try streaming from a site across the world and see how it is today. Then imagine saturating the networks with loads of it.

            Would definitely need new infrastructure to cache popular content.

  • Does anyone else ever notice that the changes like this they make are done piece mail, brick by brick ,they continue to shitify the service. That’s intentional…Imagine you tube in the year 2009. I’m betting no one really remembers, and youtube made the same bet.

    How many things have they taken away that users really like over the years think about it. Now imagine they did all those changes AT ONCE…TODAY… from 2005 at inception. Horrifying huh ?

    Big companies always start off with an amazing array of “Standard Features” that they allow everyone to use, so that the users get hooked on them, then suddenly they make an announcement like this and they change, remove, or premium tier a feature. They know you wont like it… but they got you hooked and they know it and they dont care. It’s all driven at profiteering as much as they can off of you. Honestly I see youtube trying to become like Netflix by continuing to increase inconvenience with ads (for their profit), and ultimately making Youtube a completely payed service subscription to everyone.

    They gaslight the great majority into just giving in to more ads, shittier service, and eventually a payed subscription by breaking your outrage up into small little pieces over time. STOP LETTING THEM !

    Edit: So yeah Twitter/X as predicted.

  •  weew   ( @weew@lemmy.ca ) 
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    369 months ago

    Anyways both Nebula and Curiositystream have lifetime subscriptions available right now… 90% of my YouTube viewing is from creators on those sites anyway

      • It also CAN’T be good for you long-term. Eventually providers start losing money on you. Which means they fail, or they start looking for other ways to monetize you that you probably won’t like.

        Like, say, Plex.

        I choose yearly when I can for this kind of thing.

      •  weew   ( @weew@lemmy.ca ) 
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        9 months ago

        Nebula: pay $300 once, lifetime access. They had it up for a week on a trial run a while ago, and they decided to bring it back for now.

        curiosity stream: I think I found a deal on Stack Social, + coupon, that worked out to $180. The basic 1080p format only. Again, pay once, lifetime access.

        The payoff time for Nebula is around 8 years (not counting possible price increases in the future), so you’ll have to have faith that they’ll last that long. I hope they do though. Curiositystream is obviously less. Then again, the immediate cash infusion they get from this can also help them survive/expand faster.

    •  Syrup   ( @Syrup@lemmy.cafe ) 
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      19 months ago

      I really like their business model, but unfortunately did not really use curiositystream in the month I tried out the superbundle. Some of the documentaries were alright, but it wasn’t really my thing. I may return to nebula if google figures out a way to axe adblockers for good, though

    • And i’m here wonder: do most creator care about how ads are setup? I’m pretty sure, out of the millions of creator, only a small number of them will control how ads are display, the rest only care about how much money they make. And tbf, if a platform is free, that’s how they earn money.