Youtube premium is £12.99 / month or £19.99/month for a family plan. That really doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
To know whether that is unreasonable or not you'd have to compare it to the cost of providing you that service, taking into account that youtube is just a delivery mechanism and so is infrastructure , not content. And what is or is not affordable is really dependent on where you live and that kind of money is a very large amount in some places. And especially in those places access to youtube for educational purposes…
Youtube premium also pays out the content creators you watch in lieu of the ads you don't watch does it not? At least that was my understanding.
If so it's not just the infrastructure cost which itself is not trivial for a site like youtube.
What is most interesting about this whole adblocking war: we're winning. If we weren't youtube/Google wouldn't be making such a fuss. So keep it up. I can also heartily recommend the 'unhook' browser extension, it takes care of all of those upsells and feeds.
What does winning mean in this context? If we take this to an extreme, doesn't content just not get made? Do you think Google is going to go to a model where things are freely accessible without ads? Feels like even when a company provides a way to get rid of ads, many people still won't pay. They _say_ they will, but I find often people will want to substitute their own terms (Well, youtube premium is $x, but I thin…
Youtube and friends only have themselves to blame: the tighter they turn the ad screw the more people they push to ad blockers. We went from a single tolerable, skippable 5 seconds ad segment to multiple unskipable very long segments in just a few years.
I say this as someone who pays for YouTube Premium.
What does winning mean in this context? If we take this to an extreme, doesn't content just not get made? Do you think Google is going to go to a model where things are freely accessible without ads? Feels like even when a company provides a way to get rid of ads, many people still won't pay. They _say_ they will, but I find often people will want to substitute their own terms (Well, youtube premium is $x, but I thin…
I personally prefer free content made by volunteers and would like the whole web to be ad free. It would be fine for me if Youtube stopped operations and if all "income-oriented" content producers went away. I feel the same about websites. The Internet was fine before it became commercialized. I'm both creating and consuming free content (why not?) but I'm not willing to waste my time on watching ads or anything like…
The people that create the content you consume only have so many hours in the day, just like you. They need to pay the rent, buy groceries, get their kids braces, just like the test of us. It seems immoral and unrealistic to expect that for free. Consume it and support them or don't consume it and don't support them but the attitude that you're entitled to it is a little slimy.
> I can't speak for anybody else but my content will still get made. How will your content get served? If you say you'll just pay to serve it, I think that's a fine answer.
Unless you're a VERY large and successful YT channel, you aren't making bank on YT itself, it's merch and sponsorships, Patreon and so on that make the money. Monetized Twitch-like feeds are another winner, and again not dependent on YT monetization.
Aren't these all VERY tightly integrated? They can sell merch and sponsorships _because_ of YouTube in the first place?
I think they are just updating their measures frequently, so not really anything technical. In other words: Youtube is continuously spending a lot of money to put out new patches block the latest circumventions.
Not sure it’s a lot of money. Probably just an algorithm to generate variations of the anti Adblock code. At most, polymorphic code inspired by malware.
Youtube seems to me to be a bullshit test platform. They will work around ad blockers and continue to pile on repetitive and banal adverts that have nothing to do with the user until they reach breaking point (where people flee and seek alternatives), and then they will relax their system to show marginally less bullshit. The confusing part of this battle is the app users, who do not agree with the avalanche of adver…
Video hosting is expensive and needs to be paid for somehow. Any competitor will have the same problems as Youtube does. You can go the Nebula route and require users to pay (which means far fewer users) or require creators to pay (which means far fewer creators). You could also require creators to host the videos themselves, but that also requires money, expertise and causes downtime when a video goes viral. There's…
> Video hosting is expensive and needs to be paid for somehow. Any competitor will have the same problems as Youtube does.
> I can't speak for anybody else but my content will still get made. How will your content get served? If you say you'll just pay to serve it, I think that's a fine answer.
Unless you're a VERY large and successful YT channel, you aren't making bank on YT itself, it's merch and sponsorships, Patreon and so on that make the money. Monetized Twitch-like feeds are another winner, and again not dependent on YT monetization.
That does not answer the question. There is floatplane and Nebula, but beyond those where will be the content be hosted and will those revenue stream actually cover those hosting/development costs and running the site?
And on other hand if users are paying you something, would they not expect not to have to watch through mediocre sponsorships?
Is there some place with a technical writeup of what YT are doing to frustrate circumvention so effectively?
I think they are just updating their measures frequently, so not really anything technical. In other words: Youtube is continuously spending a lot of money to put out new patches block the latest circumventions.
I actually wonder what is the balance between maybe a small team of software engineers finding way to block adblock vs generate revenue for periods when they are successful.
In the end it really is question that when they manage to block adblock do they make more money than they spend in effort.
I personally prefer free content made by volunteers and would like the whole web to be ad free. It would be fine for me if Youtube stopped operations and if all "income-oriented" content producers went away. I feel the same about websites. The Internet was fine before it became commercialized. I'm both creating and consuming free content (why not?) but I'm not willing to waste my time on watching ads or anything like…
The people that create the content you consume only have so many hours in the day, just like you. They need to pay the rent, buy groceries, get their kids braces, just like the test of us. It seems immoral and unrealistic to expect that for free. Consume it and support them or don't consume it and don't support them but the attitude that you're entitled to it is a little slimy.
Huh? Why would it be immoral? I'm producing free content myself, e.g. my open source repositories have permissive licenses like MIT, I run a blog, have put some of my music online, etc. Seriously, chances are almost 100% percent that you are massively benefiting right now from completely free of charge software that some guys developed for free in their spare time (perhaps even decades ago) - how immoral of you!
What does winning mean in this context? If we take this to an extreme, doesn't content just not get made? Do you think Google is going to go to a model where things are freely accessible without ads? Feels like even when a company provides a way to get rid of ads, many people still won't pay. They _say_ they will, but I find often people will want to substitute their own terms (Well, youtube premium is $x, but I thin…
> If we take this to an extreme, doesn't content just not get made? I'd argue that _content_ is a fairly gross word that we've all come to use because we're in the industry -- "I need some _content_ around my ads so that we get some impressions". There are plenty of other words that are less marketing associated and more clearly connotative with creatively produced material - article, report, essay, story, paper, pro…
Video as a format seems drastically overused to me. When I go to the internet to find some information, I either get ai generated essays of great length and no substance, or a link to YouTube. I'm not wasting my time watching a video even if it is sped up, just to learn something that could have been cleanly represented as a short document. If more people start using documents instead of videos where they stare at you and speak, I am in favor of this series of events.