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YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

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Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#211

Post by jamesfinlayson »

crazygringo wrote: post #208
kang wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was in pre-tiktok world(push to regular content update) & before the purge. A lot of content is now gone. Its a great resource but very loosely coupled with humanity/human knowledge (and arguably a pretty poor resource for it, both theoretically (linear information with contant velocity such as video) and practically (the content just isn't there on youtube, search is truncated etc.)). > I didn't a single thing ab…

What purge? I'm searching Google trying to figure out what you're talking about but not getting any meaningful results.

Apparently there was a purge of extremist content and another purge of AI slop? I wasn't aware of any major publicised purges, though I do remember Google saying a few years ago that they'd be deleting inactive Google accounts (with the exception of accounts with public Youtube videos I think).

Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#213

Post by Dylan16807 »

jjulius wrote: post #177
GuB-42 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they? The entire point of YouTube Premium is removing ads. There are a few other benefits, but being ad-free is the big one. If they put back ads, I believe that most people will simply cancel their subscription and get a renewed interest in ad-blockers. It makes more sense to just increase the price, as they do. It is not like Amazon. Most people get Amazon Prime for the "free" shipping, and Prime with ads…

>Why would they? The entire point of YouTube Premium is removing ads. You could've easily made this argument about Hulu right before it did the exact same thing being described here. >If they put back ads, I believe that most people will simply cancel their subscription and get a renewed interest in ad-blockers. Doing this successfully on your smart TV is a barrier that most non-techy folk aren't going to climb over.…

> You could've easily made this argument about Hulu right before it did the exact same thing being described here.

The main point of paying for Hulu was to be able to watch the shows. Youtube doesn't have that. (They tried to have premium-only shows but it was never much and as far as I can tell they stopped a long time ago.) So while youtube could obviously increase the price another $3, I don't see how they could split off a viable premium-with-ads plan. The premium features outside of ad removal are close to worthless.

Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#214

Post by kakacik »

siavosh wrote: post #212

I’ve disabled YouTube recommendations does anyone have a good resource for discovering things based on interest or even better a one time dump of some form of my recent watch history?

Get another browser and have recommendations enabled there on another account?

I get why you did it, but you sorta want the sweet cake without any carbs in it.

Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#215

Post by shiroiuma »

tombert wrote: post #51
meetingthrower wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has happened to me btw. I can only suspect they are "testing" the reception.

Ugh. I can't speak for anyone else, but I have a very strong, borderline-irrational distaste for ads. I hate advertising, I hate having to watch advertisements, I will go out of my way considerably to avoid ads. I have over 400 blu-rays specifically because I wanted to guarantee that I don't have to risk seeing ads in my media. I liked YouTube Premium because it was an ethical way to avoid ads on YouTube; there's alw…

>I have over 400 blu-rays specifically because I wanted to guarantee that I don't have to risk seeing ads in my media.

Don't Blu-Rays and DVDs have unskippable ads built in, including the FBI notice?

Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#216

Post by jamesfinlayson »

BloondAndDoom wrote: post #191
foruhar wrote: post #113

Hyperbolically, I think it's one of humanity's greatest resources. I can find anything from precision machining, LLM internals, historical footage of WWI, music performances from pretty much any era, and on, and on. There are so many things that I didn't know there was any footage of or that I didn't a single thing about that I find there pretty much daily. I wish the BBC would publish their whole archive through YT.…

Lowkey one the best things about LLMs, finally we have truly indexed YouTube which made up a massive amount of knowledge consumable and searchable in text format. I hate watching YouTube videos but like the information they provide between Youtube’s AI feature and Perplexitiy etc. Video indexing, it’s been a life saver.

Agreed - I've never followed YouTube that closely but apparently there was a time where everyone thought that YouTube favoured videos that were around 10 minutes in length... so everyone padded their short videos to 10 minutes.

Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#217

Post by lairv »

foruhar wrote: post #113

Hyperbolically, I think it's one of humanity's greatest resources. I can find anything from precision machining, LLM internals, historical footage of WWI, music performances from pretty much any era, and on, and on. There are so many things that I didn't know there was any footage of or that I didn't a single thing about that I find there pretty much daily. I wish the BBC would publish their whole archive through YT.…

Worth noting that most of youtube videos can no longer be discovered through search. Search results can now only be sorted by "Relevance" and "Popularity" while you used to be able to sort by release date

Search results are also non-exhaustive and biased towards recent videos as noted in this study https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11727

Basically many videos can no longer be discovered if you don't have a url to the video or the channel, and the algorithm doesn't recommend it

Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#218

Post by Dylan16807 »

tredre3 wrote: post #160
rconti wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? I've heard YouTubers make snide comments about subscribing "as if that has any bearing on whether you see my videos", implying that it has minimal impact on the algo.

Many YouTubers claim that some of their subscribers do not get notified when they release new videos (the "hit the bell icon" portion). They've also been claims of users being silently unsubscribed from channels. That is probably what they're referring to in your paraphrased quote. Because it would be shocking to me if there were Youtubers who truly believed that having (or not having) new subscribers had no impact o…

My understanding is that the percentage of viewers that are actually coming from subscriptions has gone down significantly. The recommendations drive everything, and they don't really care if you're subscribed for what videos they offer.

Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#219

Post by gerdesj »

foruhar wrote: post #113

Hyperbolically, I think it's one of humanity's greatest resources. I can find anything from precision machining, LLM internals, historical footage of WWI, music performances from pretty much any era, and on, and on. There are so many things that I didn't know there was any footage of or that I didn't a single thing about that I find there pretty much daily. I wish the BBC would publish their whole archive through YT.…

"Hyperbolically, I think it's one of humanity's greatest resources."

The content is one of humani .... oh it is all of ... oh its in the hands of ... a commercial company renowned for adverts.

Is there not a better place for human creativity than ... Google? Should my TV license fee fund Google?

Fuck off (hyperbolically)!

Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#220

Post by TurdF3rguson »

tombert wrote: post #36
rickcarlino wrote: post #28

My biggest concern about Youtube is that they do not truly have a competitor. They just raised premium prices again making it one of my most expensive entertainment subscriptions.

I suspect they're going to soon do what Amazon did as well, where they start putting ads into the regular YouTube Premium service, and charge an extra $3 a month for a completely ad free experience. I have the family plan shared across six accounts, and it went to $26, which really isn't that much but I'm not entirely sure why they're doing it.

The family plan is brutal. They know you can either pay the price increase or explain to 5 people why your love for them does not amount to $3.
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