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YouTube’s annoying Premium spam

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Re: YouTube’s annoying Premium spam

#71
post #67
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the internet promised to be a place where everybody could be an independent broadcaster, yet this turned out to be a pipe dream.

The problem was that it’s true without it being enough. It’s not hard to serve your own video streams. But good luck getting enough eyeballs to make it worthwhile.

I always thought Amazon would build a YouTube killer. They're really the only company perfectly placed to do so. And yet while I'm pretty sure they've talked about it they've never acted on it.

Re: YouTube’s annoying Premium spam

#72
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A 10Gbit connection at HE is going to cost you roughly $2,000/month, or about $65/day.

That will serve your 49MB video roughly 2 million times a day.

Let’s go with 50% average utilization, and say that means we need to monetize roughly 0.0065 cents per view to cover the bandwidth cost.

I think YouTube charges something like 10 cents per ad view, but won’t charge if the user clicks Skip in that 5 second window. I’m not sure what percent of views result in a billable ad, but anecdotally I’ve heard it’s surprisingly high.

I would assume storage is a much bigger cost factor, to say nothing of paying the engineers to develop and support the infrastructure.

Re: YouTube’s annoying Premium spam

#73
YouTube Premium is literally the service HN wants: honest payment to support a Google service costs and creators publishing on it. It's a sustainable service which actually earns more for creators than ads and data mining (at least according to last CPC values I've seen for video ads).

And yet, it seems like the author of this piece still feels entitled to complain about being asked to pay the price of service and these comments are full of people advertising products that still use the service without paying the asking price. It's like demanding that music authors just send you MP3s for free without paying for it at all.

I personally hope that more companies allow me to pay for their services instead of being plagued by behavioural ad tracking.

Re: YouTube’s annoying Premium spam

#74

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.

What would a good solution for this be? Ask that creators upload a separate premium version of a video with no ads and with bigger payout for views?

Re: YouTube’s annoying Premium spam

#75
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.

How would antitrust here look like? It's a subscription for a direct service... what's the monopoly solution here? Ordering Google to store and serve videos for free?

Re: YouTube’s annoying Premium spam

#76
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You’re right. PeerTube is sort of what I was imagining. Thank you for mentioning it.

Re: YouTube’s annoying Premium spam

#77
post #73

YouTube Premium is literally the service HN wants: honest payment to support a Google service costs and creators publishing on it. It's a sustainable service which actually earns more for creators than ads and data mining (at least according to last CPC values I've seen for video ads). And yet, it seems like the author of this piece still feels entitled to complain about being asked to pay the price of service and th…

No one asked for constant nag screens.

edit: HN won't let me make any more replies.

I don't know why people are fine with someone accusing me of entitlement with no basis, while me calling them out on it with a level of civility they did not deserve is out of bounds.

I don't understand this place. This is ridiculous.

Re: YouTube’s annoying Premium spam

#78
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the ability to minimize It's sad that a basic element of computing is now considered a privilege people need to pay for.

> It's sad that a basic element of computing is now considered a privilege people need to pay for. Just like it's sad that being asked to pay the creator and service provider is now something we need to write whole articles to whine about. How do you thing we'll get rid of personal data tracking and collection if you don't even want to pay a pittance for service you're using?

My problem is not with paying. My problem is that I am being asked to pay not for the content itself, but to remove bullshit limitations that shouldn't be there in the first place.

Also, it's very naive to think Google will suddenly stop tracking you just because you're paying for Premium... quite the opposite actually, as you've now given them a valid credit card and billing address.

Re: YouTube’s annoying Premium spam

#79
post #37

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 have the feeling that if you drive down the cost of bandwidth, the businesses that rely on it will say "Thank you" and change nothing, merely pocketing the bigger margin themselves. The number of ads isn't proportional to bandwidth cost, it's about what their research shows they can get away with.

The solution to that is more regulation to foster competition. Break up the giant monopolies and the market will naturally improve, and life will get better for everyone.

Re: YouTube’s annoying Premium spam

#80
post #77
post #73

YouTube Premium is literally the service HN wants: honest payment to support a Google service costs and creators publishing on it. It's a sustainable service which actually earns more for creators than ads and data mining (at least according to last CPC values I've seen for video ads). And yet, it seems like the author of this piece still feels entitled to complain about being asked to pay the price of service and th…

No one asked for constant nag screens. edit: HN won't let me make any more replies. I don't know why people are fine with someone accusing me of entitlement with no basis, while me calling them out on it with a level of civility they did not deserve is out of bounds. I don't understand this place. This is ridiculous.

You're only getting them because you're not paying anything for the service. Why do you think your "ask" matters?

Do you feel the same entitlement in other stores? When using Spotify? When visiting the movies?

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