I’ll give up on YouTube before I give up my ad blocks or 3rd party apps. Fuck off Google.
That’s likely what they want. If you’re not viewing their ads and your third-party app is even blocking all the tracking, then you are not providing any value to them to keep you as a ‘customer’. All it does is reduce their hosting and serving costs when you’re blocked or when you eventually stop using it.
It will go the way of Reddit…
Almost no impact to their userbase or revenue?
You could just pay for premium. Then you wouldn’t have ads
OTA TV: with ads
OTA TV: if you record you are pirating
Cable TV: you pay a fortune to have no ads!
Cable TV: now with extra premium stuff!
Cable TV: now with ads!
Cable TV: if you record, you’ll be prosecuted
Cable TV: pray we do not alter the deal further
Cable TV: why is everyone moving away from Cable TV?
Youtube: your own videos!
Youtube: your own videos are actually ours
Youtube: our videos with ads!
Youtube: now pay a fortune to remove ads!
Youtube: pray we do not alter the deal further
Youtube: if you download or remove ads you’ll be banned
This isn’t the pattern you’re looking for. Move along.
Oh, we’ll see at that point I would just like stop paying for it. That’s how I deal with services that no longer meet my expectations.
That’s exactly what people are doing.
Kind of, people are not quitting YouTube, I’m off them are still using it, but bitching that their free video streaming service needs to get paid.
They are still using it and costing YouTube money in aggregate
They are still using it and costing YouTube money in aggregate
The poor company only making $31.5 Billion a year has to eat the streaming cost for someone using as ad blocker? Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the billionaires?!
Oh no won’t someone please think of the people so entitled they believe they should get everything for free.
Like, I just don’t understand the thought process behind people like you.
Do you ask for free everything else?
I’ll pass, thanks. Too many streaming platforms already.
Weird to see this downvoted. Youtube is actually a good service that also isn’t cheap to run, and it also pays good(?) money to the people producing popular content on the platform so why not pay for using it? Or, you know, live with the ad infestation. Businesses need money to run, and if you don’t pay for the content, then either it’s the ads or eventually the whole platform needs to be shut down.
It is a separate discussion if Premium pricing is appropriate etc. But it’s quite horrifying to see people around the world having been taught into thinking that everything should be “free” even though at the same time everyone is complaining about privacy violation and ads being everywhere all the time.
But it’s quite horrifying to see people around the world having been taught into thinking that everything should be “free”
Maybe the businesses shouldn’t have created the expectation that everything was “free” then.
YouTube used to be 1 skippable ad at the start of the video. Now it’s multiple unskippable ads throughout the video. If the 1 skippable ad wasn’t a viable business model then they shouldn’t have been pretending it was and then changing things later once people have gotten used to the “free” system.
So you would like a plan that uses the same amount of bandwidth and power as they used back then, with one skippable ad, for free?
Is it downvoted? I’m on kbin so I can’t see anything but kbin votes and I have nothing but upvotes. lol
Edit: downloaded to downvoted
It is, it has -9 points right now. While unpopular opinion, I agree with it if you like the content.
I use it, but I am trying to move to podcast and other platforms as much as possible.
Stuff should be free. We live in an age where every one of us could be living a life of comfort and reasonable luxury with a modicum of work. In the meantime those of us who aren’t being showered by the excesses of capitalism are fully entitled to stand in the splashes.
humanity would be better off if google went bankrupt
The problem with YouTube Premium is the pricing tiers are completely out of touch with what people are willing to pay and what services they’re willing to pay for.
Let me compare to Discovery+. For $9 a month, loads of shows that ran on TV for decades can be streamed at 1080p (or whatever resolution they were available in), on up to four devices at the same time. They still have some original shows that they spend money to make. This service does not have ads.
Let’s also compare to Nebula, which like Discovery+ also has original content funded by the platform. Every content creator there is also an invited owner of the platform, so their cost structure is a bit different, but they still have to sustain the costs of running a streaming platform while compensating the creators of said content for views. Nebula is a microscopic $5 a month per user with no ads.
YouTube is a platform with entirely user-generated content (costs YT nothing except bandwidth) that is already supported at the free tier with a gratuitous amount of ads. This service has been available completely free with ad support for nearly two decades. The lowest “premium” tier they offer is $14 a month for one person to stream ad-free, at a better 1080p bitrate, be able to download videos or watch them in the background in the official app, pay creators for every view, and have a music streaming app thrown in for good measure. The only other tier is all the same stuff in a $22 monthly family plan for six users, but they all have to be in the same “household” or you’re technically breaking TOS, so in practice it’s often more like $22 for three people, and heaven forbid any of you travel for work.
Two of the “premium” features should be free anyway. You can’t watch a video without downloading it at least once, so the bandwidth cost is the same. If you download it and play it more than once, that actually saves YouTube bandwidth, and therefore cost. Any video that’s played more than once is probably going to be played a lot more than once, so this would add up, especially if the app downloads the ad spots ahead of time. Background play doesn’t cost them any bandwidth at all and is a trivial feature to implement, so it’s put behind a paywall as an artificial restriction for no other reason than to annoy users for not paying. Both of these are anti-features; to charge for them is anti-consumer. They engender spite in users, making them less willing to pay for Premium and more determined to find alternatives.
Instead of trying to figure out what people are actually willing to pay for, which is the expected behavior of a market actor, Google continues to behave like a monopoly that can dictate terms to its users. This is why people refuse to pay for Premium. If they made the anti-features free, and introduced a Premium tier that is $7 a month to one user for nothing more than better bitrate streaming with no ads, people would sign up in droves. There could be a $9 tier for streaming boxes like Roku or Chromecast that offers Premium service for any account viewed from that one specific device, without having to sign up each individual account for premium, which satisfies another niche. The $14 tier could remain for those who also want music streaming (an extra $7 is still much cheaper than Spotify premium), and the $22 tier could still be a significant value proposition for actual families.
It’s not that the price offered for the $14 premium plan isn’t reasonable for what it offers - the issue is that what it offers doesn’t match the actual needs of many people who use adblockers or third-party clients, on top of insulting users with anti-features. Until YouTube management can be made to understand this, they will continue to screech impotently about ad-blockers while driving users away and leaving potential revenue on the table.
Ofcourse you always get youtube music with the subscription, which they claim ads extra value. But I dont want youtube music, I already pay for another service. So for me it would be a waste of money
https://www.statista.com/statistics/513049/alphabet-annual-global-income/
Let’s pause a moment and just appreciate how much money Alphabet actually make net (after expenses). $73,795,000,000 last year - higher than the GDP of entire nations, in profit.
The “bad” year, 2022 that drove all this change, they only made $59,972,000,000 net. Oh how terrible (!)
5 years ago, they made $34,343,000,000 net, so they’ve more than doubled profits.
Take a moment to appreciate that, and really consider if they “need” the money.
Shareholders: you doubled your profit last year, so I expect you to do it again this year.
Pretty much. Capitalism is completely unsustainable.
That’s the whole company. How much did YouTube lose for them?
YouTube lost google -31.5 billion in 2023, approximately 10% of all of alphabet’s revenue.
I was genuinely confused by this statistic until I realised it was a double negative. YouTube losen’t Google a lot of money.
Yeah, sorry, sometimes I can’t help my need to play with language, when given the slightest chance.
Revenue is not profit
Yeah, unfortunately I couldn’t find revenue numbers. It seems unlikely to be costing that much to host. I’d be really surprised to learn it isn’t cash positive at this point.
And as we know companies prefer to provide a service with a loss, for decades. Name a company that can make -31.5 billion and keep going. Or maybe the data went to google, where they made the money.
Not made -31.5 billion. Lost -31.5 billion. As in they brought in that much, not cost it.
Gotta love this shit. Conservatives/companies: “Let the market decide!” The market: “We are tired of you cramming ads down our throats and fundamentally do not want it and will actively fight you on it.” Companies: “Waaaaaa, they are fighting us.”
Conservative companies promoting free market economy: Government, make it a crime to not use our products!
It’s funny that free third party apps literally have more features and are more user friendly than the official app with premium.
Why the fuck would I pay for less when I can get more for free?
Some years ago ago, I was a happy subscriber to Google Music. But, they added it to the graveyard, and instead grafted on some music playing functionality to YouTube and called it YouTube Music. So, I went back to Spotify.
Then I started paying for YouTube Premium Lite. It wasn’t unreasonably expensive, although it was a bit annoying I couldn’t just have “YouTube” in the household, like with Netflix. So if wife would cast a video to the TV, it would play with ads.
It was about a year ago, when Google starting cracking down on adblockers, that they also removed an option to pay for the service. I think YouTube Premium Lite wasn’t a thing in the US (correct me if I’m wrong), but they removed YT Premium Lite, and the only option left was a twice as expensive YouTube Premium bundle that included YouTube Music.
Tldr: fucked up Google Music, then removed an option to pay for YouTube premium, leaving a fairly expensive alternative with the pile of shit they replaced Google music with. It’ll be a rough time if they manage to force ads. I won’t pay for it, out of principle.
Edit: I looked at the numbers again. I’d have to pay more for YouTube than for the highest Netflix tier. It’s more than Prime and HBO combined. They also don’t have to front large sums to fund risky projects. If they didn’t include YouTube Music, I might have considered it. But with it, it just pisses me off, they can go get f.ed
Are they going to officially allow third party apps at all? The stock app is terrible, and not just because of excessive, unskippable advertising and bizarre restrictions around background play. When you search for anything, at least half of the results are completely unrelated to what you searched for in an attempt to increase user engagement metrics. It keeps trying to get you to watch shorts in its bad TikTok clone. Sometimes it recommends unrelated shorts with disturbing thumbnails in the middle of your search results. It keeps autodetecting that the video quality should be 360p on a connection easily capable of 4k, and resetting back to 360p at the start of every new video. The UI for live streams puts things on top of other things that are more important.
Please download and archive your favorite channels and videos!
Host them yourself to watch them locally.
Especially do this for educational material, share it wide and far!
We are entering a very dark age of techno-dystopia, we need to fight it with everything we have. Pirate, seed, screen-record, download, archive, share, never give up.
Quick shout out to yt-dlp. It comes everything you need to download, transcode, and even use Sponsorblock!
Made a script/cron job to auto dl new videos from my favorite channels with ytdlp and then they are hosted through jellyfin. Archived forever, ad free, accessible to me from anywhere.
This is the way.
That content does not belong to YouTube. And they also do not pay for 99% of it.
YouTube depends on people to use it for it’s existence. They also depend on those users to upload content so that YouTube can then treat that content as if it is its own and monetize it.
If I was in such a precarious position I wouldn’t go about making the experience crappy for those users that I’m desperately dependent upon.
Third party apps: “OK. We’ll show ads. Muted. Behind a black overlay. If we really can’t find a workaround.”
deleted by creator
not for YouTube but there is for twitch yea
Please don’t leave me hanging.
deleted by creator
I can’t wait for that platform to implode.
Hey Google, FUCK YOU.
It’s funny how this comes after Chrome’s switch to Manifest V3, which makes ad blocking not possible on Chrome and was purely for security reasons and not for disabling ad blockers. Now that Chrome users can’t block ads on the first-party site, they’re going after third-party clients. Such coincidental timing.
“security reasons” is the classic cop-out for making users lives more miserable.
Like what are you gonna do, argue that you don’t care about security?
was purely for security reasons and not for disabling ad blockers.
I had not heard of Manifest v3 and actually can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not. I guess you are.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/googles-manifest-v3-still-hurts-privacy-security-innovation
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-manifest-v3-deceitful-and-threatening
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/google-chrome-will-limit-ad-blockers-starting-june-2024/
They’ve been trying for years to implement this at a large price to the users. They always try to hide under the guise of security.
https://www.ghacks.net/2024/04/16/google-intensifies-fight-against-youtube-adblockers/
Time to “revanced” chrome next and patch that out.
firefox!!!
firefox and ublock origin has existed all along cmon, ditch that spyware already whats the holdup, what makes people so damn allergic to using anything other than chrome
My problem with Firefox comes down doley to the ui. I just can’t get over the blocky mess it is, but I really would switch otherwise.
It’s the UI, and how long it took them to finally get tab folders as an example. They’re always playing catch-up.
Plus, the mobile app ui is terrible, and I can’t run FF on desktop and chrome on mobile and sync items between the two, so a switch to FF means a switch on all devices. I really want to but I always navigate back to chrome.
ive been using it for a while and its always looked like a carbon copy of every other browser and vice versa
There are a ton of other WebKit based browsers to choose from! Safari, Vivaldi, Brave… not to mention good old Firefox and Gecko!
Let’s be honest, none of them compare to Chrome for many different reasons. Might be UI, or data syncing, or one of any other reasons. Given the opportunity to switch or patch chrome, I’d patch chrome.
Start to use other services like Odysee or Elacity Cinema…
Nebula is really good. I just bought a lifetime sub. Expensive but pays itself back in only a few years. Plus the creators there run it as a coop that has a takeover poison pill of some kind.
@rbos @EverlastongOS that’s the only thing I don’t understand. If it’s lifetime sub, how do they fund their costs from your usage after?
Host providers don’t have a one-time payment lifetime subscription for bandwidth usage. Eventually you will surpass the bandwidth cost of your lifetime sub and they’d be losing money keeping you. Something doesn’t feel right.
It can work out financially - I don’t know how they do it specifically, but suppose they put all the lifetime subs into one investment pool and used the interest on that to fund operations.
$300 can generate $20 per year for them. So I benefit by only having to pay once, and they benefit by getting a chunk up front instead of having it drip out over time.
Up front cash can also mean the ability to invest in larger things. They can put it into infra budget instead of ops budget.
@rbos yea, that sounds similar to what a lot of these monopolistic internet companies do. But eventually the bill is due.
If they can’t scale up with what they got, then maybe it isn’t profitable. But what I’m understanding is that they’re using “Lifetime Users” as a gamble to grow.
hmmm… maybe I just don’t like private infrastructure, but I’m at odds with this model. But if the users understand that the bubble can burst, then I wish them luck.
They’ve been trying for a minute. Must be different now that they’re saying it!
Checks notes
Nope, revanced still works.
That’s because revanced is still youtubes app, just lightly modified.
If I put my dick in your girl, is she still yours but lightly modified?
Women are not property, nor are they software
That’s your take from this?
It’s a false equivilence
You need to get better at language. Let me help you with an example someone autistic can easily understand.
You’re working at a restaurant as a waiter. You’re in charge of some tables. Your coworker says to you “Your party in the back corner asked for one of the apple pies.”. Did your co-worker just say you owned people?
Youtube isn’t some one of a kind miracle. There’s at least a dozen already-established streaming platforms that would take its place. There are thousands of websites that have no problems hosting gigs and gigs of porn, so it’s not as difficult as people think.
It kind of is. YouTube has decades of history. Unfathomable amounts of video. No indie platform will ever come close to hosting more than a fraction of a percent of YouTube’s library and be as accessible and as fast. It would cost an unbelievable amount of money in servers and maintenance let alone moderation. The problem is this is a service, like many others that exist today, that does not bring in more money than it costs. YouTube exists because it’s a branch on a megacorporation tree, but even Google will eventually need to find a way to make it profitable. It is impossible to fund this for free or anywhere close to free.
No indie platform will ever come close to hosting more than a fraction of a percent of YouTube’s library and be as accessible and as fast.
The number of times I’ve heard “XYZ will never happen” in the area of tech from one person or another over the decades (or made the mistake of thinking so myself) is high.
Youtube will either become reasonable in their practices again (which could include a pricing adjustment for ad-free access), or will be replaced as the de facto video service. It may not happen in the short timespan we’d all like to see, but it will happen.
If the modern internet teaches us anything, its that everything is ephemeral even when you stringently catalogue every last byte of data. People just dont need access to 90% of YouTube’s library, yet Youtube has to pay big money to make 100% of that library available 24/7 365.
There’s already rips at the seams of these systems. Time is not on the side of YouTube.
Like which?
Google “Odysee”.
It’s currently my preferred YouTube alternative. Granted it obviously doesn’t have as much content as YouTube. But several well known content creators post to both YouTube and Odysee now.
Some of the ones I follow include: Louis Rossman, Anton Petrov, SomeOrdinaryGamers, and Zach Star Himself. Just to name a few.
And there’s also a browser extension called “Watch on Odysee” which adds a button to the YouTube video if the video is also found on Odysee so you can “watch on Odysee” instead of YouTube. Which can help you locate your favorite youtubers on the platform and let you follow them.
And there is also an Odysee mobile app if you like watching videos on mobile.
This is just one example, but I hope it helps ;-)
