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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

#191

Post by BXlnt2EachOther »

falcolas wrote: post #154
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…

I've been paying for premium for years now - at least 6 years. I think the problem for me now, and why I'm canceling it shortly, is their push to raise the price by 40% in the coming months. The value for that new price is just not there. Some of that is due to my own changing habits, but even more of it comes from the content creators I follow in the gaming space being serially demonetized thanks to overly sensitive…

Is the 40% increase region-specific? I'm a YT Premium subscriber and they just had a price increase in the US three months ago ($120 to $140 yearly, similarly billed monthly).

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

#192

Post by cykros »

huytersd wrote: post #130
mvdtnz wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What’s that?

Using bypass-paywalls works so far if you add it to the custom list, and as a bonus, you end up getting in less of an echo chamber because it displays as if you've never logged in. There's also a set up for ublock origin that works that's out on their reddit somewhere, though I can't be asked to go through it, nor use reddit anymore, so you may need to search that up on your own, but it's recent and works.

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

#193

Post by falcolas »

BXlnt2EachOther wrote: post #191
falcolas wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been paying for premium for years now - at least 6 years. I think the problem for me now, and why I'm canceling it shortly, is their push to raise the price by 40% in the coming months. The value for that new price is just not there. Some of that is due to my own changing habits, but even more of it comes from the content creators I follow in the gaming space being serially demonetized thanks to overly sensitive…

Is the 40% increase region-specific? I'm a YT Premium subscriber and they just had a price increase in the US three months ago ($120 to $140 yearly, similarly billed monthly).

The $10 to $14 is coming (for me) in December. I've been paying long enough I believe I was grandfathered past the increase you mentioned.

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

#194

Post by cykros »

seydor wrote: post #127
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.

They were illegal then too. Just not as well enforced. Paying for a VPN is where a lot of people dropped off, and while streaming pirate sites are a thing, most people don't realize that search engines that aren't in the US are a thing, and so them not showing up easily on Google or Bing means they may as well not exist.

Just means my fmovies streams don't get so bogged down with too many simultaneous viewers.

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

#195

Post by brewdad »

itsoktocry wrote: post #121
yifanl wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I happily subscribe to Spotify because it just works better for me. I would subscribe to YT Premium if I could get YT only for like $5-7. I'm not paying $14, or realistically whatever the family plan is up to now, for ad-free YT and an inferior music experience. So YT doesn't get any money from me.

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

#196

Post by dotnet00 »

duxup wrote: post #126
dotnet00 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The patreon model works pretty well for creators, far more reliable than YouTube ads since it provides a stable income with the ability for the creator to control expectations.

YouTube ads are not a sustainable source of income, as YouTube can demonetize or allow a copyright claim to steal away the fruits of your labor with no meaningful recourse. On top of that, ad revenue largely relies on a constant stream of uploads which favor the whims the current iteration of the recommendation algorithm.

As for being a means of funding a video host, sure, a patreon style model might not be sustainable, but the point was that people are willing to pay for a service if the payment is earned rather than coerced through bait and switch tactics.

Put differently, at this point I will insist on consuming YouTube without paying for it and without watching ads in any way possible. If a similar service (but paid) were to pop up where the creators I'm interested in were to move to, I'd happily move over, just as I switched to Kagi as soon as I confirmed that it was good enough for my purposes.

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

#198

Post by NemoNobody »

bravoetch wrote: post #94
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…

People might be less disgusted with paying for YouTube if their model was "make a good product for end users" instead of "premium is to make the experience less worse by removing the worst part of a bad experience".

This is exactly why I refuse to give Google money voluntarily.

All of my issues with YouTube they created intentionally. I just recently found a trick that had YouTube play in the background when I switched tabs and I recalled how life was before they created Red and it annoyed me all over again.

Google is the devil of today's tech companies - most of what they do utilizes the outright theft of our data and what they do with it is purely manipulative in nature.

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

#199

Post by cykros »

dixie_land wrote: post #59
JAlexoid wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you consuming any YT videos, then? Why are so many people feel entitled to YT videos without ads?

No one is entitled to YT videos without ads. But at the same time, Google is not entitled to dictate how my user agent renders a page, locally, on my own computer . I'd have no problem if google just inject ads directly into the video streams. ( by which time, equally I'm entitled to configure my own video player to skip whichever frames I want )

Well, they are entitled to code the page how they'd like, provided it's not anything that meets criminal standards for malware.

And if they do start putting ads in video streams then I will likely be writing them off for dead just like I did months ago with Reddit. Til then I'll be using the various moles that still haven't been whacked (there's a good few) and not suffering through the experience. If they think they're getting a dime from me with the agenda they push, just because the creators I want to see don't have time to post across the variety of platforms (yet), they can get their heads examined.

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

#200

Post by arprocter »

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…

Apples to oranges (live vs not), but last Sunday (the very expensive) NFL Sunday Ticket via YouTube TV had terrible buffering problems for about the first half of every 1pm game

Eventually they made a config change and it began varying the bit-rate instead of just stopping, but it wasn't a great demonstration

https://downdetector.com/status/youtube-tv/

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