Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 375 posts

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#331

Post by PeterisP »

mr_mitm wrote: post #228
iteratethis wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, it's a high interest rate phenomenon. Investors want to see profitability. But it's also a problem unique to trillion dollar companies: finding growth. If you have a money printer of $280B per year, how do you find growth that moves the needle? For new product development, you'd need to launch a product that brings in revenue of say $20B, otherwise it's just not that interesting. Imagine how hard it is to launch…

Why do they have to grow, though? Can't they just be profitable? They can just pay out dividends like coca cola, no?

A stable company that pays out their profits as dividends is reasonably valued at some x*profits.

A company that reinvests these profits in things which investors believe will result in growth is valued x*future_profits, which is much larger - so if the leadership of a 'growth company' would announce that they're now a 'stable company' just paying out dividends, they would destroy most of the stock value of their investors, and would be considered an absolute failure of that leadership, since everyone involved has a strong incentive to replace them with someone who can make it (at least in the eyes of public) a 'growth company' again, doubling or tripling its value for the same revenue.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#332

Post by ilovetux »

mgraczyk wrote: post #237
notpachet wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Paying for a product instead of being the product. You're still the product. You think they aren't still collecting info on what you watch and associating that with your google account for cross-marketing elsewhere on the web?

You can opt out of that without paying anything

You can opt out of the personalized ads, but you cannot opt out of the data collection, storage and correlation.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#333

Post by mgraczyk »

ilovetux wrote: post #332
mgraczyk wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can opt out of that without paying anything

You can opt out of the personalized ads, but you cannot opt out of the data collection, storage and correlation.

To the extent that it is relevant to what I was replying to, you absolutely can opt out of "collecting info on what you watch and associating that with your google account for cross-marketing elsewhere on the web".

https://adssettings.google.com/partnerads

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#334

Post by carlosjobim »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #265
verdverm wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see it as extortion or... Paying for a product instead of being the product. Huge quality of life improvement. How is it different from paying for Netflix and similar?

There are two issues. On youtube the content was uploaded by creators on the understanding it would be freely accessible to everyone. Additionally it's a matter of user control and rights. They don't get to tell the user what their user agent does and what content it should fetch or display to the user or what code it should run. It's their website, but it's my device. The next step is for youtube to require you to w…

> On youtube the content was uploaded by creators on the understanding it would be freely accessible to everyone.

A lot of YouTube creators make their content for money. YouTube in this case is the layer between creator and watcher, making sure they get paid. Wether that is by ad money or subscription money. Before that, things were much more difficult for video creators.

> The next step is for youtube to require you to watch the ad and stop playing if you look away.

The next step for YouTube is hopefully to put the entire site behind a login and remove all ads.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#335

Post by wredue »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #275
wredue wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice moving the goalposts! I wasn’t talking about the types of ads you see, I was specifically addressing the absolute bullshit claim that “if you pay, you are no longer the product”, which is 100% demonstrably bullshit. Secondly, paying for premium doesn’t in any capacity stop you from seeing scam ads in the sharing networks Google powers. Given that other platforms are already showing ads for their paid tiers, it i…

Nice moving the goalposts! ... I'll type slowly this time to make it easier to understand: I don't care about ads on other sites, I only care about avoiding them on YouTube, and YouTube Premium currently works fine for that. It's OK if they "spy" on me to keep the other ads relevant, but that's not the subject of this thread.

Okay?

The point is that the claim that “paying for premium means you’re no longer the product” is absolutely, and demonstrably bullshit.

Now you’re just giving money to Google for you to be the product, with a side benefit of (currently) not seeing Google ads.

This it going to change within 16 months anyway, as Google shifts away from broad spectrum premium towards premium having different benefits, and you’ll have to have individual paid subscriptions to remove ads for specific users (not unlike twitch, where paying for prime no longer removes ads).

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#336

Post by sbarre »

mgraczyk wrote: post #333
ilovetux wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can opt out of the personalized ads, but you cannot opt out of the data collection, storage and correlation.

To the extent that it is relevant to what I was replying to, you absolutely can opt out of "collecting info on what you watch and associating that with your google account for cross-marketing elsewhere on the web". https://adssettings.google.com/partnerads

My ad blocker and Pi hole block that page, (un?)ironically.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#337

Post by dragonwriter »

wredue wrote: post #271
CamperBob2 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dislike ads. But when I do see them, I'd prefer they were relevant to my interests. I might order an ADF4377 evaluation board, but I'm not going to be buying any feminine hygiene products or timeshares in Phoenix. So as far as I'm concerned, they can spy all they want. That horse left the stable years ago anyway. Just don't waste my time with ads on YouTube, and we won't have any beef. So far Google has held up the…

Nice moving the goalposts! I wasn’t talking about the types of ads you see, I was specifically addressing the absolute bullshit claim that “if you pay, you are no longer the product”, which is 100% demonstrably bullshit. Secondly, paying for premium doesn’t in any capacity stop you from seeing scam ads in the sharing networks Google powers. Given that other platforms are already showing ads for their paid tiers, it i…

> I was specifically addressing the absolute bullshit claim that “if you pay, you are no longer the product”, which is 100% demonstrably bullshit.

Right, you are never "product" in the first place. You are either paying user or a supplier of product, both of which are providing something of value to the company in exchange for what they provide you. The "product" witticism is a bad presentation of the problem, both mistaking the source of distinction (presenting it as pay vs. not-pay) and the nature of the issue (presenting it as product vs. customer.) It's related to another overused and misleading statement, the idea that "the customer is always right" is a general principle (when, in fact, it very much is not and businesses actively work to drive out undesirable paying customers, and strategically neglect the particular interest of others, all the time.)

The real issue is that if you are a small, replaceable fraction of a broad set of people from whom a firm can get the same thing of value -- whether its attention to ads, or a small monthly payment, or whatever -- there is very little reason for the company to expend effort catering to things that will keep you in particular (rather than the broad group as a whole) happy and willing to supply the thing of value in question, and if you are part of a particularly demanding subset of that group, placing a high demand on resources but from which the firm is not able to extract greater value by market segmentation, then the firm is quite likely to not only not want to expend much to satisfy you, but is likely to actively wish to drive you off as a customer.

The real issue is that you are a commodity vendor seeking to influence a large buyer (or a commoditized purchaser trying to influence a large seller), not that you are "product" or that you aren't "paying money".

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#338

Post by Jakob-G »

calderknight wrote: post #307

It seems very much more likely that YT has ineffective moderation than that it doesn't want to take down scam ads.

That's kind of the same thing. They don't improve their moderation because they don't want to take down scams, so they can make as much revenue as possible.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#339

Post by matteoraso »

segphault wrote: post #32

I routinely see ads for fake medical treatments that they refuse to take these down when I report them despite the fact that the ads obviously violate Google's policies. So many of the ads on YouTube are for things that are obviously sketchy that when I see a new product I'm not familiar with for the first time in YouTube ad I just assume it is a scam. It's crazy because YouTube has probably more information about th…

I've gotten a few ones that told me that vision problems have nothing to do with your eyes. It said that the problem was entirely neurological, and if you keep trying to hide from the issue by wearing glasses, your family would put you in a nursing home. No, I'm not kidding. The "cure" they were selling was some sort of vitamin, which was certainly untested and unregulated. Truly awful stuff.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#340

Post by ceroxylon »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #113
iteratethis wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to sign up to become a community notes contributor. Then you can add notes, and if enough people from a diverse set of other contributors find it helpful, the community note will publicly appear. It's one of few things at Twitter that work shockingly well and reliable. I've never seen an obvious partisan community note. Other networks should embrace this.

> It's one of few things at Twitter that work shockingly well and reliable. Elon doesn't think so. I would expect it to change soon. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1733882978781053383

The way he was corrected by a community note on that statement... kinda hilarious.
Post reply on HN