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Comment on YouTube's plan backfires, people are installing better ad blockers

Look I hate YouTube ads too, and ads in general, but let’s say every user of a service is like you. Attention is all the currency they’ll ever get from you, that’s totally cool, absolutely. I’m totally that way too. But they’ve got to make money somehow, so if you’re not the paying customer, someone else has to be.

I’m not saying it has to be ad sales either, but if we want a world in which we can use services for free without ads, we need to come up with an alternative way for them to make money. It has to come from somewhere, and by the bucketload.

If every user thinks like you, then it doesn’t matter how many people you talk to or share links with, you’re not a net gain on their service, you bring nothing to it.

Why should they, or anybody, be thankful that you honour them with your presence, if you contribute nothing of value? What makes you so entitled to use somebody’s product for free with no strings attached?

Ads suck, I’m eager for us to move past them once we figure out an alternative that keeps products in business and us receiving things for free. But we can’t deny the reality we live in right now either. Even huge companies like Google (who yes, do suck) have to make money to survive.

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daltotron@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I think generally you will find that people of this opinion hold that it is unreasonable that we have privatized basically all of the internet infrastructure. These people tend to be in favor of expecting the consumer spends more on hardware for hosting, and enthusiasts, hobbyists, non-profits, and occasionally companies develop the software necessary to make the internet function, rather than companies just paying for tons and tons of warehouses of servers, and then just forcing the software to all become fucked up walled gardens while the actual utilities everyone rests upon is left to rot.

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- FunctionFn@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Huh, I wonder why people holding that opinion would be on Lemmy…
  
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  - Lev_Astov@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Surely a coincidence.
    
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jasep@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

they’ve got to make money somehow

But they have been, and for years. All the years I’ve run a smartphone Google has harvested and profited from my data. From Gmail to Chrome (before I switched) to Maps - they have profited from people’s data at scale. So the argument that they need to make money somehow falls flat for me.

Also, if they charged like $2 a year to block ads, plenty of people would buy it. But like most things lately, the enshitification of our user experience continues. It’s not enough for companies like Google to “make money” - it’s never enough and their greed has no boundaries.

That’s why you see people like us pushing back - enough is enough.

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- arrowMace@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Google doesn’t make money directly from harvesting your data, they make money from harvesting your data then showing you ads based on that data. So if you’re running an ad blocker then they aren’t making money from you (unless you pay them for stuff like subscriptions and apps). As ad blocking becomes more common they are definitely going to get more draconian to try to claw back that money (growth is infinite, profits must go up /s).
  
  Also BTW Google probably makes more like $50 per user per year on average (looking at revenue and internet population) so they would never offer a $2/year ad block unless forced to by regulation.
  
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  - jasep@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    
    they make money from harvesting your data then showing you ads based on that data
    
    That’s part of it, yes. But they can also sell ad companies demographic data - males aged 25-44 clicked on this or looked at that for example.
    
    Google probably makes more like $50 per user per year on average
    
    I highly doubt the number is that low.
    
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NightOwl@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

Look I hate YouTube ads too, and ads in general, but let’s say every user of a service is like you.

I understand the message about needing to fund services to exist, but that stance I feel doesn’t always really work too well. Since if other users were like them then it’d also mean there might be a lot of stuff that doesn’t exist anymore which could be a pro like microtransactions ceasing to exist and move to subscription model failing.

And for YouTube might be completely different where depending on their taste maybe click baits turned people away if the person hated them, so those don’t exist. And long winded videos attempting to take advantage of the algorithm failed if they were someone who didn’t like videos that wasted their time, and everyone is like them.

Reddit might still support third party apps if everyone was like them, and lemmy bigger. That’s why if everyone was like them argument is just a weird one, since it turns minority actions into a majority and changes way too many things to focus on one singular thing.

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KillerTofu@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
YouTube creates no content and it’s reliant on people volunteering their time and talent to them. Fuck the idea that we need to pay google to access content they only host and don’t pay fairly for.

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