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YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

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Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#121

Post by itsoktocry »

yifanl wrote: post #68
itsoktocry wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can pay for some unrelated product that's named Youtube Premium What do you mean "unrelated"? For the price of your Spotify subscription, you get an YouTube Music and ad-free YouTube. Seems like a good value prop. I'm a subscriber.

I mean unrelated as in unrelated, I, nor anybody have I talked to want a Youtube Music subscription or yet another podcast app.

>I mean unrelated as in unrelated

Okay, we've established you don't know what unrelated means.

YouTube with no ads is $12 a month. How can it be more clear?

>I, nor anybody have I talked to want a Youtube Music subscription or yet another podcast app.

I'm sure some of these people happily subscribe to Spotify, and can't spot a good deal staring them in the face.

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#122

Post by [deleted] »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #15

It strikes me as so odd that people readily pay for netflix, hulu, HBO etc, but when the idea of paying for youtube comes along, who directly profit shares with small creators you adore, people fall over backwards in disgust. I guess it has to do with initial value proposition. If you hand out lemonade for free, people are going to be pissed when you start charging a dollar, regardless of how good of a deal it is. Ev…

[deleted]

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#123

Post by sandworm101 »

savingsPossible wrote: post #42
Workaccount2 wrote: post #15

It strikes me as so odd that people readily pay for netflix, hulu, HBO etc, but when the idea of paying for youtube comes along, who directly profit shares with small creators you adore, people fall over backwards in disgust. I guess it has to do with initial value proposition. If you hand out lemonade for free, people are going to be pissed when you start charging a dollar, regardless of how good of a deal it is. Ev…

As another has said: we have a problem with dumping With giving youtube for free for long, to reduce the possibilities of other platforms, and then charging, when your library is "unbeatable"

>> when your library is "unbeatable"

It isn't the library. Youtube's trove of videos will age fast if there was any meaningful alternative. What prevents any competitor is youtube's legal backing. They have already fought the RIAA/MPAA and the content rules of hundreds of jurisdictions. Youtube has deals, understandings, in place that allow youtube to keep going. But if anyone else tries to setup a similar video service, at scale, those hard-fought deals will not apply. Those past enemies of youtube are now its tame watchdogs ready to unleash themselves on anyone who else attempting to enter the market.

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#124

Post by bloppe »

contravariant wrote: post #64
Workaccount2 wrote: post #15

It strikes me as so odd that people readily pay for netflix, hulu, HBO etc, but when the idea of paying for youtube comes along, who directly profit shares with small creators you adore, people fall over backwards in disgust. I guess it has to do with initial value proposition. If you hand out lemonade for free, people are going to be pissed when you start charging a dollar, regardless of how good of a deal it is. Ev…

This isn't about paying for youtube, this is about ads. People don't want youtube ads, and frankly it's their good right to not have to download, display and watch them if they so choose. What youtube now wants is proof that people have watched ads. This is problematic for 2 reasons. The first is that there is no way to prove you've watched an ad in a way that's not a privacy nightmare and extremely hostile to users.…

Paid youtube is the default. Ads are just an alternative option for people who don't want to pay. Why do you feel so disgusted that they're providing you with an alternative option?

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#125

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #104
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ya'll don't want to pay It's easy to wonder why. The status quo at the time had been that user-submitted video content (YouTube) is free. It was only free because Alphabet had their losses from YouTube subsidized by their profits from Google. Maybe not for all, but for many this is an anti-trust issue.

Youtube was not free at the time vid.me came to be. Also, using money from one business to keep another business alive is not a monopolistic practice. Plenty of tech companies have had the technical and monetary firepower to run a youtube competitor. But you just have to read a few threads on the internet from anytime in the last decade talking about youtube and monetization to see why no one wanted to jump in. This…

> Youtube was not free at the time vid.me came to be.

Sorry but this take is pretty wild to me. I can understand that there is a paid option but YouTube is free today given that I can currently watch a video after watching a couple ads without paying any money.

> Also, using money from one business to keep another business alive is not a monopolistic practice.

I'm not sure this is true in theory but, regardless, to each their own. This practice of keeping competitors down by subsidizing business losses with profits from another business, only to try to change the status quo for their customers, seems pretty shitty from where I'm standing.

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#126

Post by duxup »

dotnet00 wrote: post #93
duxup wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm inclined to agree. The whole internet discussion about this topic and even "eshitification" has boiled down to "I want it for free and I don't want to pay." Meanwhile users are happy to jump to the next free thing starting the whole cycle again, until it wants to get paid for. The web kinda stinks in ways, but users don't want to pay either... so want ends up being the product?

That's a very slanted and bad faith interpretation of the discussion. Enshittification is about companies running all other competition out of the market with their free service, then once they've secured their near monopoly, they clamp down with increasingly user hostile changes and act like it's unreasonable that people don't want to pay for the product whose "selling" point was that it was effectively free. This a…

Enshittification is a term and it gets thrown about like crazy these days / it's losing meaning as quickly as it came about. I'm seeing it all over this story.

The patreon model has a lot of limits that would make it unusable for something like Youtube / creators who don't gather a regular large audience and so on. I think the people who give via a patreon model is a very very small % of the userbase too.

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#127

Post by seydor »

foobarian wrote: post #19

Youtube has been a fantastic demonstration of how valuable it can be to enable democratized, low-barrier-to-entry content publishing. Think of how much treasure there is on the service, with millions upon millions of hours of educational, informative, or archival content, all published and viewable for free, with incredible reliability and availability. Of course this is also fantastically expensive to build and main…

I could say the same for bittorrents, napster, kazaa and audiogalaxy in the 00s. Maybe we turned to youtube because all else had become illegal?

We can still watch demonetized channels, google doesnt seem to nag me about those.

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#128

Post by huytersd »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #15

It strikes me as so odd that people readily pay for netflix, hulu, HBO etc, but when the idea of paying for youtube comes along, who directly profit shares with small creators you adore, people fall over backwards in disgust. I guess it has to do with initial value proposition. If you hand out lemonade for free, people are going to be pissed when you start charging a dollar, regardless of how good of a deal it is. Ev…

You’re right in that people are more reluctant to pay for something they’ve had for free for so long. I also think YouTube is pushing this pretty late in the game. People already have $15 subscriptions to multiple services at this point. The $15 YouTube subscription feels expensive to me on top of the ones I already own. I wish it was like $6 for no ads especially since I don’t care for the bundled music service.

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#129

Post by HlessClaudesman »

slimsag wrote: post #109
LightHugger wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The endgame here is adblockers that spoof ad views and even sometimes clicks rather than just blocking them. This is very very bad for google if they force adblockers to work like that. People will do it.

Another possible endgame is all YouTube videos are livestreams and you cannot skip on the timeline, with ads inserted directly into the stream. In that world, the best an adblocker would be able to do is show a blank screen for 30s while it waits for the real video's frames to resume.

If YT only live streams content, content caching services will strip out the ads, and play with a delay.

Youtube will never monetise tech savvy users and should just stop trying. We only need to be slipperier than the average gazelle and the lions will never catch us.

Re: YouTube's 'War' on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet

#130

Post by huytersd »

mvdtnz wrote: post #84
contravariant wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't about paying for youtube, this is about ads. People don't want youtube ads, and frankly it's their good right to not have to download, display and watch them if they so choose. What youtube now wants is proof that people have watched ads. This is problematic for 2 reasons. The first is that there is no way to prove you've watched an ad in a way that's not a privacy nightmare and extremely hostile to users.…

There's a sure-fire way to avoid 100% of YouTube ads without paying a cent, though.

What’s that?
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