Live data from Hacker News

YouTube’s annoying Premium spam

theverge.com

51–60 of 191 posts

Re: YouTube’s annoying Premium spam

#51
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about competition or regulation. Someone needs to find a way to drive down the cost of bandwidth. Disclaimer in bio.

I don’t really see how the cost of bandwidth is the main factor. What would change by lowering said cost? The corporations of the oligopoly would also benefit and I feel they would just have larger margins allowing them to keep their dominance. I’m no expert though, so I’m more curious than in disagreement.

a 49 mb video watched a million times is 49 tb bandwidth.

1 tb bandwidth cost of aws is 236 usd a month.

Re: YouTube’s annoying Premium spam

#52
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about competition or regulation. Someone needs to find a way to drive down the cost of bandwidth. Disclaimer in bio.

I don’t really see how the cost of bandwidth is the main factor. What would change by lowering said cost? The corporations of the oligopoly would also benefit and I feel they would just have larger margins allowing them to keep their dominance. I’m no expert though, so I’m more curious than in disagreement.

IMO the main reason a YouTube competitor fails to spawn is bandwidth costs and lack of advertisers making it immediately really unprofitable.

Re: YouTube’s annoying Premium spam

#53

I've had YouTube Premium/Red for years (the only thing I pay for to watch video content), but I'm about to cancel it because they now show ads on videos if those videos are embedded in other web sites. Most of the content I watch is on other web sites that curate content, and now the benefit of YouTube Premium is gone.

Can the embed detect your logged in state? Privacy settings may have changed in the browser.

Yes I am starting to suspect it has to do with changes in Chrome. I can't find out how to modify site settings to make it work though.

Re: YouTube’s annoying Premium spam

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most companies are trying to find the "second act" and need to bump up ad impressions and revenue until they find that next source of revenue. For Google, it's been cranking up the number of Youtube ads displayed per video and also making various changes to the way Google search results are displayed (the ads seem to blend more into the results than before). But I've definitely noticed this myself.

Yeah this feels quite right with what I'm experiencing. Surely it must risk creating an opening for competitors to show up with far fewer ads.

I think the problem here is that YouTube alone isn’t profitable. I think the only thing keeping it going is as an additional vector of ad placements for Google. YouTube is an extremely expensive service to run as well. No one really has a chance to compete with the sheer volume of content and inertia of YouTube.

What I would like to see instead is a return of self-hosted videos from creators’ own websites plus a site like YouTube that is really just an aggregator of those videos. That way you can also have smaller businesses that provide YouTube-like services for those that don’t want to self-host, but those videos still get included in that aggregator. I think that would be the best ecosystem for competition.

However, I have no idea how feasible that is. It’s just an idea that came to mind.

Re: YouTube’s annoying Premium spam

#55
post #3
post #2

Welcome to the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU3GzYcb1g8 Tech companies are an oligopoly with a few actors. Competitions do not offer enough pressure to make them change. Regulation is the only way forward if we do not want to end in a dystopia.

Agree. We need some old school style trustbusting.

For a moment I read that as truthbusting and got a little frightened

Re: YouTube’s annoying Premium spam

#56
post #29

I ditched the YT iOS app last night as the web interface is finally quite usable in Safari (iPad). Fullscreen works fine, quality and speed settings work fine, PIP mode works out of the box… Both on my Pi-hole-powered internal network and my nextdns.io based mobile setup the experience is so. much. calmer. I recommend giving it a shot. If pi-hole is not an option for you, check out NextDNS. Solid tracker & ad blockin…

Seconded. I've never seen a single one of the popups from the OP myself, which I thought was curious until the author mentioned they were using the Android app, whereas on mobile I only use Youtube from within Firefox, which is perfectly serviceable (and apparently less annoying).

Well, I got rid of the native iOS app because the modal nag dialogs had become so annoying that I didn't want to put up with it anymore.

Re: YouTube’s annoying Premium spam

#57

I pay for YouTube premium but I'm still subjected to ads in the majority of videos I watch: the kind that are embedded by the creator directly in the video, eg, a one minute sponsored by Squarespace segment. I don't know how Google is framing YouTube premium (I get it through my Google play music subscription) but it is most assuredly not an ad-free experience.

FWIW, the videos with sponsored content are frequently either not getting money from YouTube (such as the gaming segment), or not getting enough from the ads that do run (COPA affected and . The creators may also be futureproofing their livelyhood in fear that their segment will be the next one that YouTube demonitizes by default.

It’s not very profitable to be a content maker (outside the top .01%), and many content creators are paying a team to help them produce regular, high quality videos.

Re: YouTube’s annoying Premium spam

#58
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this feels quite right with what I'm experiencing. Surely it must risk creating an opening for competitors to show up with far fewer ads.

I think the problem here is that YouTube alone isn’t profitable. I think the only thing keeping it going is as an additional vector of ad placements for Google. YouTube is an extremely expensive service to run as well. No one really has a chance to compete with the sheer volume of content and inertia of YouTube. What I would like to see instead is a return of self-hosted videos from creators’ own websites plus a site…

Just /s/YouTube/Peertube (a federated video host) in your second paragraph, and it turns out to be a thing already:

"What I would like to see instead is a return of self-hosted videos from creators’ own websites plus a site like Peertube that is really just an aggregator of those videos. That way you can also have smaller businesses that provide Peertube-like services for those that don’t want to self-host, but those videos still get included in that aggregator. I think that would be the best ecosystem for competition."

Re: YouTube’s annoying Premium spam

#59

YouTube Premium is worth it IMO. No adds, the ability to minimize, and downloading videos locally, all within the same app are killer features.

I agree it’s worth it, but for slightly different reasons. No ads, yet the creators are getting a significant amount more money for me watching their content.

It’s the easiest, and most sanity-proof way to get money to most content creators I watch.

Re: YouTube’s annoying Premium spam

#60

I pay for YouTube premium but I'm still subjected to ads in the majority of videos I watch: the kind that are embedded by the creator directly in the video, eg, a one minute sponsored by Squarespace segment. I don't know how Google is framing YouTube premium (I get it through my Google play music subscription) but it is most assuredly not an ad-free experience.

FWIW, the videos with sponsored content are frequently either not getting money from YouTube (such as the gaming segment), or not getting enough from the ads that do run (COPA affected and . The creators may also be futureproofing their livelyhood in fear that their segment will be the next one that YouTube demonitizes by default. It’s not very profitable to be a content maker (outside the top .01%), and many content…

I don't dispute any of that. I'm saying that, as a YouTube premium subscriber, I'm not clear exactly what I'm paying for. I mean, I guess fewer ads is better than more ads but I think a paid service should be able to provide me with stronger guarantees.
Post reply on HN