YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach when it comes to getting viewers to disable their ad blockers..
    •  fidodo   ( @fidodo@beehaw.org ) English
      19•11 months ago

      The corporatization of the world feels like it’s coming to a head. You’re not allowed to own anything anymore. Everything is a subscription and it’s impossible to afford property. You just rent everything putting you on constant edge until you die.

    •  orbit   ( @orbit@beehaw.org ) English
      16•11 months ago

      This is the fallout from the technology industry shrinking and coming to terms with itself. See the crash of the Silicon Bank recently as an example. Basically as the positive outlook toward these kind of businesses and pursuits continues to mellow out we’ll see these companies look inward to squeeze as much money out of their products as possible.

    •  StenSaksTapir   ( @StenSaksTapir@feddit.dk ) English
      13•11 months ago

      I was just thinking the exact same thing. Things seems to have accelerated lately, but I don’t know if this is something regular users even notice or care about and it just feels significant to us because of the recent twitter and reddit idiocy.

      I am super excited about all the attention the fediverse is getting. There are still a ton issues to be solved here, but decentralization feels like the next evolutionary step of the web.

      One of the issues is “who’s gonna pay for it”? And I think the answer is something like “most users are”, in the sense that you’d pay your local instance, the same way you used to pay for newsgroups. Thus keeping it out of the hands of venture capitalists, hedge funds and billionaires in general, because hopefully we’ve learned that that’s a bad thing.

      •  jmcs   ( @jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de ) English
        10•11 months ago

        Big tech was basically a big dumping scheme, built on top of cheap money (i.e. low interest rates). This prevented smaller competitors from challenging oligarchs, but now the interest rates are too high for this to be sustainable, so they are scrambling to make their businesses actually profitable without admitting the entire business model was unethical and, well… just plain stupid in the long term.

    •  Pekka   ( @Pekka@feddit.nl ) English
      9•11 months ago

      Isn’t this just what many people predicted what would happen when everybody would use adblock? Now most people use some kind of blocker and some browsers even ship with a content blocker. Now pages need to make money in another way, so that’s either subscriptions, donations. or just force people to watch the ads anyway. I doubt people would want to donate any money to YouTube so then you get this.

      It is not nice for users, but without income they would have to shut the site down. The same will happen when Lemmy gets popular, people will really have to donate to instance owners or they will also be forced to get money in another way.

      •  jherazob   ( @jherazob@beehaw.org ) English
        17•11 months ago

        Oh, you mean the multibillion dollar corporations? The ones that get more per minute than many business will get in their whole existence, not to mention any of us people? No, adblocking is a drop in the ocean for them, that has always been bullshit, same with piracy. What we’re seeing is the result of economical effects outside of all this, namely changes in interest rates, all the VCs and shareholders are now demanding the return of their investments at any cost. That’s why ALL of them are squeezing at the same time.

        And about Lemmy instances? Absolutely! We cannot depend on the generosity of admins forever, and i’m OK with this.

    •  moon_matter   ( @moon_matter@kbin.social ) 
      9•11 months ago

      I think companies have seen what happened with Twitter and it has convinced them that they can try more drastic revenue generation strategies with little repercussion. They have all become strong monopolies in their respective domains and users who have grown up with the current offerings are not willing to put up with lesser alternatives.

      The internet is basically ~10 websites for most people, only occasionally veering off the path to find some one off information. The casual user sees no reason to put up with the growing pains of alternatives and will put up with a lot from Google and friends if it means not having to create a new account on another website with no content.

      How can you possibly replace YouTube and Reddit? Their value is in their user base and it’s impossible to replicate that type of “success” overnight.

    •  DarkenLM   ( @DarkenLM@kbin.social ) 
      3•11 months ago

      They can go to extreme lengths to make it work, such as not playing the video if not adds are detected or embedding the ad directly into the video. Not even Firefox can escape those things.

      •  Mika   ( @Mika7150@beehaw.org ) 
        5•11 months ago

        there are ways to counter that like fetching an embed player and imposing that onto the page, or sending an api call that says the ad played, or vpn to a country without ads for a tiny portion of the loading process, etc

        we proved that with twitch where you can still very much block ads despite all they’ve done to avoid it

          •  Mika   ( @Mika7150@beehaw.org ) 
            2•11 months ago

            well some countries legally have no ads and you could vpn to them specifically for the video fetching part and get the adfree version. alternatively things like maybe an AI powered sponsorblock extension could be created in response

          •  ByteSorcerer   ( @ByteSorcerer@beehaw.org ) 
            1•11 months ago

            Sponsored sections are basically ads injected in the main stream. The SponsorBlock extension can already get around those, so that’s already a good proof that it’s technically possible.

            SponsorBlock works with user-generated data: anyone using the extension can mark sections of a video as sponsored segments, and once several users have reported the same then the extension will automatically skip that part of the video for other users.

    •  Ollie   ( @Ollie@feddit.uk ) English
      5•11 months ago

      It’s a lot harder to federate a YouTube competitor because storing all that video costs a lot more than text and links.

      I wish they’d just insert the adverts into the videos so we could fast forward them if we wish. Why do we have to be locked into watching the same handful of adverts over and over.

      They used to let us skip after 2 seconds and then it went from one advert to two. Now it’s two unskippable adverts. No wonder people want to block them.

      •  mrmanager   ( @mrmanager@lemmy.today ) English
        2•11 months ago

        Imagine thousands of instances, paid for by individuals. It’s not expensive to rent a server with maybe 50 GB of space for less than 10 dollars.

        So 50 GB times 1000 = 50 TB of data. Of course not YouTube level but that’s just 1000 people too.

        What if 100.000 people paid that much?

        I think federated is the future.

  •  xray   ( @xray@beehaw.org ) English
    22•11 months ago

    I guess this will be an unpopular opinion, but YouTube is justified in doing this imo. Video hosting isn’t cheap, especially providing 4K & 8K. They’ve gotta be able to support costs somehow, and if you’re not paying for Premium, you should be paying with ads. You’re also preventing the content creators from being compensated for content that you find valuable, useful, and/or entertaining.

    I know ads are annoying, and I hate them just as much as you do. But a big reason why we have people who make super niche videos that help you learn how to fix something on your car or those regular videos that you watch every week is because the creators are able to get compensated for their work. Are you really saying that utility and entertainment isn’t worth 30 seconds of ads and it’s better to not support them at all?

    Part of the reason we’re in this enshittification era of social media is because of the expectation of social media to be free. We need to learn from our past mistakes. It’s not sustainable.

    •  Domiku   ( @Domiku@beehaw.org ) English
      19•11 months ago

      Yeah, I kind of agree on this. The real question is: is YouTube currently profitable, and they’re trying to squeeze even more out of users?

      It would be nice if companies could look at a tidy profit and just say “that’s enough” and leave it be. Alas, that’s not how capitalism operates…

    •  cmnybo   ( @cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de ) English
      6•11 months ago

      They could limit 4K and 8K to paying users and most people probably wouldn’t even notice.

      Their video player is dumb enough to automatically default to 4K even if your monitor is only 1080p. That must waste a lot of bandwidth.

    •  Sphere   ( @sphere_au@reddthat.com ) English
      4•11 months ago

      There are plenty of viewers who don’t want/need/care about the resolution. Especially not 8K, probably not even 4K. People who watch on their phone, probably won’t even notice if the content doesn’t go above 720p.

      Anyway, if YT wishes to charge for their service, they should try having more reasonable fees, and making sure fees actually remove all ads from the service, and actually reward creators fairly - they get much less than they should as a proportion of fees paid.

      As it stands, it is much better to subscribe to the likes of Nebula or to individual creators through Patreon (if they host their videos there). The bill might end up adding up to something similar or even more than YouTube Premium, but at least you get what you paid for and the money goes to the creators, not to line Google’s executive’s pockets, which in the end means better content, better platforms and a better viewing experience.

    •  zombiespammer   ( @zombiespammer@kbin.social ) 
      2•11 months ago

      I agree, a lot of the creators on YouTube make these great videos and channels because of the financial compensation they are receiving.

      But there should be other video hosting platforms to break the monopoly of Youtube, so that Google would not be willing to do moves like this, for fear of losing viewers to other competitors.

      •  Satelllliiiiiiiteeee   ( @Satelllliiiiiiiteeee@kbin.social ) 
        4•11 months ago

        They’ve never really made money through the AdSense payments though, and it’s not because of adblockers. YouTube is notorious for demonetizing videos for more or less no reason and for false DMCA claims that allow trolls to hijack AdSense from the video’s creator. Most money being made by YouTubers is being made through sponsorships or direct support through Patreon/Ko-Fi/etc

    •  goatskin4197   ( @goatskin4197@lemmynsfw.com ) English
      2•11 months ago

      Except it’s hardly ever just 30 seconds of ads. In my recent experience, especially if you don’t press the skip button, it’s 2-5minutes of ads every few minutes of video, which is terribly excessive.

      Someone at work the other day put on a music playlist, and frequently YouTube would start playing ads that were HOUR AND A HALF LONG INFOMERCIALS.

  •  NataliePortland   ( @admin@thegarden.land ) English
    20•11 months ago

    Totally. YouTube is barely scraping by these days. Them and all of Google. They’re riding the bus to work. They had to stop eating out. Poor almost richest company in the world. They NEED us to turn off as lockers or else they’ll have to shut the whole thing down

    •  Buttons   ( @Buttons@programming.dev ) English
      1•11 months ago

      If this is true, it seems like a condolence of what YouTube is doing here. If hosting all those videos costs more than they receive, eventually YouTube will end.

      I always imagined that YouTube was quite profitable?

  •  Deemo   ( @Deemo@lemmy.fmhy.ml ) English
    12•11 months ago

    What kinda bugs me about youtube premium is that even if you pay you still get ads via baked in sponsors. I know creators have the right to do what they want with there content but I wish as a user there is an economical opiton to truely block ads.

    Currently there are two paid models:

    1. Nebula like services. I kinda wish more platforms like this would popup since atleast when you use them you truely get no ads (no baked in nor platform injected). While they have a lot of creators a lot of creators are missing from the platform (its mostly education/tech focused).

    2. Patreon/Floatplane. Now this is typically the more popular option with creators as it guarantees a reasonably stable cash flow. The problem is as a user if you have to subscribe to multiple patreons for adfree content it can easly get to the cost of a cable bill (assume each creator charges $10 per month if you have 10-20 creators your follow you could be looking at a minimum of $100-$200 a month just to enjoy adfree content).

    A kinda caviot is idk how much it costs in time/labor for production of youtube videos for major channels like linus. It could be that services like Nebula/Vessle would never be able to cover production cost hence why a patreon model is used. Even youtube ads if I recall only was able to cover about only one of their employees saleries (a lot but not enough to sustain the company).

    I hope this post didn’t come of as selfish/greedy.