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

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

404media.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 316 posts

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

#41

Post by jncfhnb »

PedroBatista wrote: post #14

It's amazing to me how Google is allowed to control every side of the market with no real repercussions. I don't want to be the cynic who says Google has been paying lots of money to "the right people" in order to keep the status quo, but.. Google has been paying lots of money.. That might be a moderate huge win for Firefox.. until someone at Google makes a phone call to Mozilla's offices. Worst case scenario it help…

Such a call would be extremely dangerous as antitrust evidence imo. This seems very unlikely.

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

#42

Post by savingsPossible »

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"

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

#43

Post by JAlexoid »

yifanl wrote: post #24
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…

Well, you can't pay for Youtube. You can pay for a bundle of some mostly unrelated products that's named Youtube Premium, or you can live with an insanely degraded product experience on Youtube, but you can't pay for Youtube.

YouTube Premium is ad-free YouTube. That's literally "paying for YouTube".

But it sure seems that you're trying to rationalize your unwillingness to pay for something and it does sound very entitled.

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

#44

Post by itsoktocry »

yifanl wrote: post #24
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…

Well, you can't pay for Youtube. You can pay for a bundle of some mostly unrelated products that's named Youtube Premium, or you can live with an insanely degraded product experience on Youtube, but you can't pay for Youtube.

>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.

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

#45

Post by spaceribs »

gretch wrote: post #38
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 believe that we have been fortunate that Google's ad business was willing to subsidize it for us for so long with so little required in return. Unfortunately it appears that possibly the screws are getting turned, and there is less appetite for the subsidy. Um well no. They still have appetite to support the business with Ads (and they offer a paid version if you don't like Ads). The thing they no longer have app…

well it's not their computer, and I'll run what I want on it (...so far)

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

#46

Post by katbyte »

Clubber wrote: post #40
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 just pay the $15 a month to not get ads. The content is worth way more than that to me. I wish they would stop censoring stuff (like raw news, firearms learning channels, etc). Content warnings over just taking the videos down would be much preferred. That's really my only gripe.

I also pay to avoid ads AND support the creators i watch as they make more per my paid view then an ad supported view.

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

#47

Post by wing-_-nuts »

tekla wrote: post #8

I'm happy to pay for services and a Ad free YT experience.

I'd be totally willing to pay for premium if it also stripped out sponsor spots, patreon begs, etc.

I paid for curiosity stream and nebula this year, and every time I watch a video over on nebula I'm reminded how awesome it is to watch content without sponsor spots or begs. I have UBO and sponsor block installed, but frankly if those stop working I may just mostly give up on youtube entirely.

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

#48

Post by mschuster91 »

MBCook wrote: post #11
tekla wrote: post #8

I'm happy to pay for services and a Ad free YT experience.

Same. I keep seeing the discourse recently and it’s all framed as if only two options exist: People can use ad blockers, or Google can block them and annoy people. There is a very good third option for people: pay for the (expensive due to bandwidth) service you’re using and you see no ads. And Google won’t block it because it’s encouraged as the solution to this exact issue. The level of “I should get everything for…

> People can use ad blockers, or Google can block them and annoy people.

Thing is, we're still getting ads because AG1, NordVPN, Guardio and similar services/products of questionable nature keep throwing tens of thousands of dollars at youtubers to insert 1-2 minutes of sponsor blocks.

> There is a very good third option for people: pay for the (expensive due to bandwidth) service you’re using and you see no ads.

So you pay, and yet you still pay twice because the data on what you watch ends up in Google's Big Data profiling/targeting infrastructure to determine what kind of ads you'll get shown across the internet.

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

#49

Post by mentalpiracy »

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…

Google destroying goodwill with a low-effort rent seeking agenda, after years of effort to extinguish real competiton.

Giving money to Google for programmatic ads ≠ funding creators. Most creators are small and don’t make any real money from YT anymore, and every year fewer and fewer are willing to endure the infinite mystery box of YT moderation and contentID policy.

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

#50

Post by [deleted] »

rpgbr wrote: post #29
MBCook wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. I keep seeing the discourse recently and it’s all framed as if only two options exist: People can use ad blockers, or Google can block them and annoy people. There is a very good third option for people: pay for the (expensive due to bandwidth) service you’re using and you see no ads. And Google won’t block it because it’s encouraged as the solution to this exact issue. The level of “I should get everything for…

Alphabet profited nearly USD 20 billion last quarter. Not revenue; net profit. I'm pretty sure they can afford airing less ads per video watched without any damage to their bottomline. So… sorry, but there's a third, better way. The problem is: it doesn't work in a late capitalist environment where Google/Alphabet and all public trade companies operate.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN