Ads have almost always been part and parcel of the YouTube experience. However, there's a point at which ads become so frequent, so irrelevant, and so relentless that they start hurting the user experience. We've been past that point for a while now.
Ironically, without an ad blocker it’s hard to read the Android Police blog. I invite anyone to try.
Allegiance to Google is what's ridiculous, they haven't deserved to exist since their IPO and the parasite they are needs to be pulled off the internet
It is faster, doesn't crash and you can read the answers to all comments. It lacks some features of NewPipe like the display dimming via swipe, but has some UI advantages (sharing without timestamp, you pain in the ass!).
New version of newpipe can already do that tho, glad that these projects are giving each other inspiration to work on the features that user want, unlike certain company
I stopped paying when they increased the price, for less functionality.
Still paying membership for a couple of youtubers I wanted to support (that don't have patreon, or ko-fi, or stuff like that), but gonna keep using adblocker for as long as I can, since YouTube adds are awful.
You can like something and want it to be better. In the lack of actual alternatives the vitriol against YouTube’s anti-user decisions makes a lot of sense. I think you’re just being contrarian.
Youtube is one of those things you can't avoid in practice. So if you don't like it what do you do? do you just miss out on most existing video content?
This just in, people don’t like ads. At all. Most people.
It is time to find a new business model that works. I’m not smart enough to know what that is so that you don’t piss off users, but whoever figures it out will be a billionaire.
People need to eat, bills need to be paid, shelter needs to be provided and unless people can have these at no expense and create things for pure passion & share for others to enjoy then they need the means to pay for these things.
The internet has whittled this down to a few basic models:
Pay the service directly for the content (subscriptions or 1 time purchases)
'Free' content and they serve you ads which they are paid for by companies trying to sell something to you
'Free' content and they sell every bit of data they can scrape from you to companies which are again, trying to sell something to you.
If you could find a way to do anything without having to pay for our human needs then would it be a trillion dollar idea or would money be meaningless now when people wouldnt need it to live & enjoy their lives?
I pay for YouTube and use FreeTube and NewPipe. I try to pay for whatever services I use. I think this is the way, either pay or let the ads play. I do this because the YouTube app is trash for many reasons mostly having to do with trying to funnel me to the money making bits.
There are greedy corporations making the user experience worse and doing everything they can to wring every penny they can. Ultimately, I attribute this to the wall street investor model. A company can be making money and still be losing because their revenues shrank from the prior quarter. That is a broken system that will only eat itself. That being said, people gotta eat and that includes the janitors, etc.. at Google.
Point is, its a mixed bag. There are people on the other end making the product you are using, AND there is a soul sucking company making it worse for both their customers and their workers/creators. To be clear, there is something to be said about how poorly Google supports their creators. In many ways, they are taking advantage of the creators that use their platform. How is it that Google is making so much money in ads, but creators have to open Patreons?
I still don't think we should just expect stuff for free.
Tangentially, I need to be better about helping support the open source projects I use, especially the smaller maintainers, to be honest, but I do send to a few and I encourage everyone to do so as well as much as they can.
The trouble with YT Premium is how much they’re charging for it.
We used a VPN to get Ukrainian family YTP for a fraction of the price they charge here in the UK. We pay something like £4 a month now for both of our accounts. That would be the better part of £20 a month if we’d done it legit. Fuck that noise.
Sure, it comes with YT Music, but I’ve literally never used that. I have Apple Music and an iPod. So £20 a month JUST TO REMOVE ADS.
I don't mind ads in the sidebar or on that little banner across the bottom of the screen sometimes. Its when the ads completely cover the content I'm trying to watch/view and/or start auto playing at obnoxious volume that I get annoyed. (Also fuck people on metered connections right?)
Back in the early days of youtube, I didn't mind them. Just a few ads here and there. Nowadays, the internet is barely usable unless you have an adblocker.
The credit card companies should have invested heavily in micropayments. If I could just pay a tiny non subscription fee for a bit of media I would do that in a heartbeat.
I would pay for premium IF it was a reasonable price.
I don't want shitty music bundled or whatever fuck else they are calling it now JUST youtube.
AND here's the big one, I want the fucking downvote count back and sponsor skip. Most videos have ads and fucking sponsor segments which are also fucking ads. I'm not paying to watch that.
And downvote count is absolutely crucial to be able to detect bullshit videos quickly.
Google is offering a shit product and asking a premium price. Fuck em.
YouTube already has ToS on their API and has paid tiers. But a lot (most?) of the third-party apps and tools bypass the API and directly scrape the site.
I'm sure there's an in-depth reason for it, but there is one that scrapes Old Reddit, instead of the main site, and it works great for me (Stealth on f-droid). There's also RedReader, a client that was allowed to keep API access because of it's accessibility features... which I guess Reddit just couldn't be bothered to implement into their own app.
The Chinese consumers have been eating up ads like that for their TVs to power on for roughly half a decade at least. I'm talking Xiaomi. Chinese consumers are the perfect ad(shit)-eating consumer; so docile and they like to burn money (I mean, they do...literally).
Eventually, the users will rebel and just stop watching, and then the video creators will follow, because if nobody's watching, then there will be no reason to create on YouTube.
Yeah, I didn't mean to come off quite that grim, but reading it again. I definitely see where it was a hell of a lot more morbid than I meant it to be.
For most people who refuse to use it, it's probably because they view it as more a haven for extremism and hate speech, as it seems to have made its niche by allowing those who were banned elsewhere (not always a bad thing...depends on offense).
Most of Rumble’s prominent accounts are run by individuals, not organizations, and about a quarter have been banned or demonetized on other social media sites. The Center’s study examined 200 prominent accounts on Rumble, selected from those with the most followers. As of June 2022, about eight-in-ten accounts (78%) were individuals while 21% were organizations. About a fifth of these prominent Rumble accounts (22%) have been banned or demonetized on other platforms.
Guns, abortion and LGBTQ issues were among the subjects that prominent Rumble accounts focused on in June 2022. A review of posts from these 200 prominent Rumble accounts found that about half posted about guns and gun rights (49%) or abortion (48%), 44% posted about LGBTQ issues, and 42% posted about the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. These posts came amid widespread discussion of major events and issues that were regularly covered in the news at the time.
Google being an ass about alternative YouTube clients is somewhat dumb but they likely prefer to control user experience. They're a for profit entity so it shouldn't be that surprising. Google kicking users that cost them money is not dumb.
Or maybe Google should just improve the experience so people want to pay for a premium subscription. But instead of investing in a better user experience they'd rather intentionally make it worse to drive consumers to pay to unshitify it. But instead they're blowing loads of cash which could be used to invest in the platform and turn even more profit, but they're using it to fight a war with their customers for short term profits. They are dumb.
Yup. I've considered paying for YouTube premium, but:
it's too expensive for how much I watch
the YouTube app kinda sucks - NewPipe is nice to use (adjust volume and brightness by sliding a finger)
it's unclear how much creators get from my subscription
there's still sponsorships and whatnot
Nebula gets rid of the ads and sponsorships, and my understanding is creators get a larger cut vs YouTube. Grayjay allows me to follow multiple streaming services and has the volume/brightness management bits as well. I'm willing to pay for both of them because they bring value, YouTube doesn't.
We'll never know since we don't have numbers that Google does. Sadly, that also makes Google the best candidate to determine what's the best strategy for them :p
YouTube already did the math, as did almost every single company and corporation on the planet.
There's a lot more revenue in advertising than subscriptions, especially on a website that started off entirely free (so Netflix for example goes in the subscription model rather than the advertising model but that seems to have changed!)
There's a mass of people who follow up on these advertisements. The latest advertisements I've encountered on YouTube are really really calculated and well scripted. For example the digital dollar advertisements sound like they're going to save you from financial ruin. It's clever and it's working. Money is pouring in.
I create content that goes into YouTube. I generate a tiny bit of revenue from that. I have no say into how YouTube treats my viewers. If you watch the ads, awesome, I get some money. If not, I'm just glad you watched the video.
The majority of content on the platform is made up of channels my size and smaller. Most of us are getting paid pennies.
But YouTube doesn't care about us. They want to appease the larger studios.
Not sure that big business favouritism is the intent, but it's definitely more lucrative for them. Especially with Vimeo and other alternatives out there.
I remember when streaming took off in a big way - some on YT and others on justin.tv (later Twitch and now Amazon's Twitch) - and I thought you'd have to be objectively bonkers to rely upon an opaque and ever-changing algorithm for your financial future. Some have gamed it well, but it's pretty easy to see how they've survived - fake shock/reaction content, alt-light or worse content, polarising opinion, thinly-veiled advertorials, and so on.
But, economically speaking, you get what you incentivise for: if you can game the system and get the click/eyeball ratio, then they're going to do that.
Yeah, I’m just saying that some exceptions break through. Some YouTubers make content that is so good that people outside of YouTube consistently share the shit out of it. They don’t need the click bate for the initial boost, they get the boost from sharing off the platform.
Youtube doesn't care about the collective "you" that is its namesake. It hasn't for over a decade. Itps all about the big studio level productions. It's no better than the mainstream television networks at this point.
Maybe its due to my age, but I use YT for tutorials on diy or fixing shit. I get 20s in, then whammo, ad. Just as the guy is focusing in on the area I need to see. I am watching a 5min video and 2min of ads.. it is ridiculous.
Don’t forget that if you have to rewind a part to see something the creator blew past that you needed to see and you get another two ads. Fuck that noise.
Isn't the replacement to Echelon, just PRISM? Which yes Google are a part of, along with Meta, Microsoft, etc. As well as the lesser known MUSCULAR program.
Could be I just can't get over the timing of echolon suddenly being called over and Google appearing almost instantly
That said I still use Google just don't trust it really I've always felt it was an intelligence company in truth and probably the echelons replacement.
