Asking genuinely, if you were in charge of YouTube, and you don't think anyone should pay for YouTube, and you don't think you should run ads, how exactly would you go about paying for the massive amount of engineers and infrastructure needed to keep the lights on?
Comment on YouTube warns it might make your viewing experience worse if you don't turn off your ad-blocker
TheAlbatross@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
Sorry Google.
I’m gonna use YouTube ad free or I won’t use it.
And I ain’t gonna pay for it.
BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social 11 months ago
stevedidwhat_infosec@infosec.pub 11 months ago
For me personally, I would rather pay for a service than with my time via ads.
That said the services provided these days are unreliable, gatekept, metered and not enjoyable. Why should I pay for shitty service?
Therefore I’m only left with one option and my wellies are strapped tight! 🫡
AnonTwo@kbin.social 11 months ago
I...honestly don't think you're particularly honest about this.
Mainly because Youtube red exists and it's main sell is removing ads, but we already know the answer to that. (Most people don't actually want to buy the service)
And it's not like it's shitty service. It's Youtube without ads.
kobra@lemm.ee 11 months ago
I don’t need music, I just want ad free YouTube. There isn’t an option for users like me.
BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social 11 months ago
Well, if YouTube were truly so terrible that you think it offers no real value, you wouldn't use it at all. If you yourself don't use it, that's all well and good, but if you do still use it anyway but block ads, then you're admitting that it offers some amount of actual value while refusing to pay for it. In that case, it's hardly unreasonable for YouTube to decide to not take on the cost of offering the service to those that aren't going to pay for it. You'd probably be more than a little annoyed if your boss told you that you'll be working extra hours for free.
RaincoatsGeorge@lemmy.zip 11 months ago
There’s nothing inherently valuable to YouTube other than the fact that it’s the default video hosting website because it got there first. You can find other similar websites that provide video hosting that is equivalent, just without the massive audience YouTube has. Keep in mind your argument only works for G rated content because anything that is slightly controversial, even history based content, gets demonetized and there’s an entire other website called patreon that gained popularity because YouTube wasn’t paying its content creators for their work.
YouTube has lots of options for getting people to pay for their content. If they opt to pursue ad revenue they need to accept that a subset of their audience will use 3rd party apps to get around that. Most people don’t have ad blockers so it’s really only people smart enough to download the plugins. To me this is akin to Reddit pissing in the face of their users for the sake of maximizing profits. I get why they’re doing it, but for every trick they employ to get around ad blockers someone will come up with a workaround and I’ll just download that plugin each time.
HowManyNimons@lemmy.world 11 months ago
YouTube is okay. I’ll watch it if it’s free or very cheap. I won’t watch ads for it.
Usernameblankface@lemmy.world 11 months ago
This is an interesting perspective. Many people are willing to put in time and effort to get around restrictions on adblockers, but not willing to give up time to ads or give up money to avoid ads.
I think if and when adblockers are no longer an option, many who fall in this category would be pushed into the paying category, while others would be pushed into grumpily watching ads.
The minority would go elsewhere to find other entertainment at an acceptable price.
sour@kbin.social 11 months ago
patreon
stevedidwhat_infosec@infosec.pub 11 months ago
Sorry I have no idea how to @ people yet, not sure it’s implemented in this app yet
admiralteal@kbin.social 11 months ago
But YouTube Premium is incredibly reliable, unlimited, and full of enjoyable content?
I think you just don't want to pay.
HowManyNimons@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I don’t want to pay what they’re asking no.
sour@kbin.social 11 months ago
if people can grt things for free
they’re going to get things
for free
stevedidwhat_infosec@infosec.pub 11 months ago
Mmm not the whole truth, and that is why they get away with it:
youtu.be/4Q3ZXQZZlcE?si=bZLNupgMEnn_uWDS
Netflix does similar things it would seem
TheAlbatross@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
Honestly?
Not my monkeys, not my circus.
I don’t care what YouTube wants to do or how they do it, they need viewers and if they can’t figure out how to keep em, ah well.
BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social 11 months ago
Well, actually, they have to create a service that caters to people who bring them revenue. If that isn't you, they don't have to, and actively shouldn't, cater to you at all.
You're just saying "I don't have an actual answer" in a roundabout way.
TheAlbatross@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
Well, I don’t, but it isn’t my problem.
Google makes enough money as is, I don’t really care if the make poor decisions and end up with an unviable business model. I’ll do other things with my time.
drkt@feddit.dk 11 months ago
The reason I don’t bring them revenue is because they continue to make the experience worse. Paying isn’t going to make that stop, it’s just going to temporarily shift the bar a little; the bar is however still moving towards a shittier experience for all.
Why would I look at this and go “Yes, I’ll pay!” There are a lot of services I would genuinely pay for if I didn’t have an impending dread that the service is just about to get worse again regardless of if I pay or not. It’s not like paying is a magic bullet, either, it comes with a ton of different issues like privacy. They still sell your soul to advertisers if you pay them.
roo@lemmy.one 11 months ago
I paid for Lynda.com, and it could have easily taken in more business if YouTube wasn’t working so hard for Google ads. There are a lot of paid (and free) services that suffer because of YouTubes ad-money business model.
Netflix could use the extra business. There are plenty of services failing to thrive while YouTube exists. Peertube would be wide open if YouTube went the way of most of Google’s stable of apps. PeerTube is wide open even if YouTube doesn’t go away anyway.
People genuinely hate ads. It’s a high degree of enshitification. YouTube could divide into paid content and free content in a simple Freemium model.
Or, add third tier with ads, which any user can opt out of in the same way contributers can. I’d be happy to click subscribe on an ad free experience with less content available to me.
Or, add an option for a couple of free tier items per month, week, or day. Like Medium’s business model.
It’s not hard to stop sucking!
_number8_@lemmy.world 11 months ago
well its not my problem
deranger@lemmy.world 11 months ago
That’s a flippant response when you were asked specifically to pretend they were your monkeys.
TheAlbatross@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
That’s true!
hedgehog@ttrpg.network 11 months ago
In 2022, Youtube was getting $14 ARPU for free users (from ads) and $120 ARPU for premium users. With premium users contributing so much more to their bottom line, one would think they would strive to keep those users subscribed, but instead YouTube started raising prices and even stopped honoring the grandfathered price points their long term subscribers (like myself) were at. I would have kept paying for my family subscription indefinitely at that price point - which is still several times higher than the revenue they would get from me as an ad-consuming customer - but they opted to not allow that, so they lost all the revenue they’d been getting from me entirely.
Youtube specific stats are hard to find, but Alphabet is one of the most profitable companies worldwide, with a profit of just under $80 billion in 2022, so your question is honestly irrelevant. The status quo would have been more than enough to keep the lights on. This isn’t about making ends meet; it’s about getting as much profit as they can.
Even so, the person you replied to didn’t say YouTube shouldn’t run ads or charge for a subscription. They were talking about themselves and their willingness to watch ads or subscribe.
And because enough people aren’t like that person or like me, YouTube is going to continue to grow their revenue and their user base - for now, at least.
rebul@kbin.social 11 months ago
I don't mind paying for YouTube content. I do mind their data harvesting, however. Figured out that my life isn't diminished at all without Youtube.
killeronthecorner@lemmy.world 11 months ago
You think it costs $30b a year to run YouTube?
There’s a middleground between reckless profiteering and not making any money at all. And yet YouTube discontinued their $5 tier. But no, it’s the kids who are out of touch.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 11 months ago
I’m perfectly fine if commercial platforms like YouTube go out of business. This will create space for smaller platforms run by users as a hobby instead of a business, which I think would lead to a healthier media ecosystem. Honestly, advertising is not a healthy activity for society. If it were up to me, it would be banned.
Usernameblankface@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Not OP, but I personally would like to see a variety of options for how I see ads. Not what ads I see, but how they’re delivered. I imagine several less intrusive options and the option to continue ads as they are now. I would need two or three less intrusive options combined to cover my viewing, or I could take only the current annoying interrupting ads on their own.
On second thought, YouTube would just end up turning on all options and stopping playback for anyone who finds the options list.
Kyle_The_G@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Subsidise it with your other services
PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world 11 months ago
From a financial standpoint, that doesn’t make any sense though. Why would you continue to run a service that is a net drain on the rest of your business? Unless it can offer some meaningful, tangible benefit to the company, why continue to operate it at all? If a service needs to be subsidized to survive, why does it need to survive?
Google has basically used it to increase their tracking capabilities across the web. They know when you visit any site with an embedded YouTube video. But that’s only possible because they’re already a massive company. And it’s not reasonable to expect them to continue subsidizing it out of the goodness of their hearts. After all, if you’re willing to ask them to subsidize it, why aren’t you willing to help by paying for premium? It’s easy to say “just subsidize it” when it’s not your money.
To be clear, I don’t pay for premium and probably never will. But this thread has a lot of emotionally charged “because I want it” responses, which aren’t really grounded in reality. YouTube has operated at a loss for a decade, and only continued to operate because it had the backing of a tech giant. But if that tech giant wants to stop subsidizing the site and finally make the site profitable, that’s their prerogative. Yes, it’s the final step in the enshittification process. Yes, it means free users will have a worse experience. But ultimately, the company isn’t required to care about the free users.
decisivelyhoodnoises@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
If YouTube operates at a loss and they decide to ditch their service its their problem, not mine. I’m not here to save google
Nilz@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
Why would they? It’s not like it’s going to be bringing customers to their other services and Google isn’t a charity.
NOT_RICK@lemmy.world 11 months ago
They’re not a charity, they’re a monopoly. So fuck them I don’t care how people circumvent their increasingly shitty service
BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social 11 months ago
"Just don't worry about revenue at all" is the best kind of secret genius business strategy that I come to Lemmy for.
_number8_@lemmy.world 11 months ago
by being owned by google?
_number8_@lemmy.world 11 months ago
yeah, them needing the money (??) or whatever is one thing, but this arrogant fucking attitude lately is so repugnant. set up a patreon, don’t fucking fight against your users like this. it’s not exactly real TV or oxygen, it’s fucking youtube. it’s 90% garbage anyway
iAmTheTot@kbin.social 11 months ago
Pretty sure that they are fine with that, they are actively trying to get rid of you.
PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Ding ding ding. It’s an unpopular opinion, but it’s the harsh truth. This is essentially akin to a super high maintenance Karen going “I’m never going to shop here again” even though she immediately returns everything she purchases. The company isn’t making any profit off of her, (in fact they’re losing money because she demands employees’ attention whenever she’s shopping) so a sensible corporate response should be “okay, we’re glad to see you go. Please don’t come back.”
YouTube doesn’t want the users who block ads and refuse to pay. Those users are a net drain on the system. Lemmy likes to yell about FOSS, and there is a lot to love about that… But ultimately, the F in FOSS doesn’t really mean “Free”. It means “Free to the end user”. Someone had to devote time and resources to building and hosting that “free” thing. The fact that they’re willing to share their effort is great! But it can’t be the expectation.
As someone who does a lot of freelance work, I’ll say the same thing that I say to clients when they ask me to work for free because of the exposure: Exposure is what people die of when they can’t pay their rent. I’m not saying YouTube is going to go bankrupt because of these users, but the users can’t reasonably expect YouTube to continue to pay for/accommodate them.
dannym@lemmy.escapebigtech.info 11 months ago
The F in FOSS does NOT mean gratis. I absolutely hate that we decided to call it Free. There have been attempts at saying another word like libre, but those haven’t worked out.
I don’t agree with the FSF on a lot, but their definition of free software is as follows:
“Free software” means software that respects users’ freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.” We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis.
You may have paid money to get copies of a free program, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies.
paperplane@lemmy.world 11 months ago
A nice example of this is Ardour: A DAW that’s free in the sense that the source code is GPL, but the prebuilt official binaries have to be paid for.
_number8_@lemmy.world 11 months ago
this is a salient point sure, but you are perfectly capable of wording it in a way that doesn’t also suck off a shitty malignant corporation. why the fuck would you sympathize with google? they have trillions of dollars, it is literally not at all comparable to your work.
darthelmet@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I don’t think that’s entirely true. Or at least not in the longer term view of it. YT isn’t just some random store that doesn’t want to deal with an unruly customer. It’s a big tech monopoly platform. Like the other tech giants, their strategy has always hinged on becoming the only game in town. And they predictably use the same tactics monopolies have been using for the past century:
Offer the product at such a low price that you take a loss and use your hoard of money to outlast would-be competitors who don’t have a massive pot of money to burn. In YT/Google terms this is the fact that it’s a free site and up until very recently they’ve done little to nothing about adblocking users despite being one of the biggest tech companies in the world, knowing it is happening, (It was in their chrome extensions search, plus they don’t pay the creators for the no-ad views.) and having the capability to stop it at least for their browser, which a lot of people were already using. Why not go to war with adblockers sooner when their entire business is built on advertising? Because that’s the cost they were willing to bear to turn YT into a monopoly. They could take the hit on not getting ad revenue from some users, but some hypothetical competitor certainly couldn’t.
Make switching hard. A site that’s grown as large as YT has massive network effects. For viewers, that’s where all the videos are. For creators that’s where all the viewers are. For both that’s where there is enough of a community that there are lively discussions in comments. Nobody outside nerds like us is going to some external site they’ve never heard of. If you want to get your stuff out there, you use YT. Then there are things like creator contracts to further discourage switching.
Ad block users aren’t valueless to YT, or at least they weren’t. They were a portion of those viewers and commenters that contributed to YT becoming THE video social media site. They comment, share videos around, maybe even contribute directly to creators to allow them to keep making YT video. You maybe lose a out on a couple cents from the lost ad views for each one of them, but the value of the network effect gained by keeping them around this long far outweighs that loss.
They’re doing this now because they can. They no longer have meaningful competition to kill off. The few that kinda cross into their market are also massive tech platform monopolies that are currently engaged in the exact same thing. They can’t expand their customer base anymore, so now they’re extracting more money from the captive audience they have.
And it’s not just adblock users they’re increasing the “price” for. YT has added an insane number of ads to their videos and increased the price of YT Premium. If adblockers died tomorrow, they wouldn’t be like “What a relief, now that we’ve gotten rid of the freeloaders, we can finally lower our prices for everyone since they aren’t bearing the burden of the non-payers.” They just get to tighten the screws even further because they would have gained an even more dominant position over their users.
In a fairer world, we’d all pay a reasonable amount for the things we use or move on to an alternative if we’d rather not. But we don’t live in that world. We live in capitalist hell world where everything is a monopoly and the government is so captured by those corporate interests that they basically never enforce even the meager anti-trust laws we do have.
whats_all_this_then@lemmy.world 11 months ago
On I 100% agree with you here. But here’s my (and I think a lot of people’s) logic:
It’s slightly different in the case of YouTube. The shop isn’t putting Karen (and everyone else) under a microscope the second she walks into the store, and using that data to tailor what she sees in their other branches so she’s more likely to buy. They’re not creating what’s effectively a gigantic influence market out of the data, and I don’t think you are doing that to your clients either (although to be honest, I’d be pretty impressed if you were).
YouTube is free because “we are the product”. They’re harvesting our data whether we block ads, skip ads, watch ads, or pay for premium (as far as I know, please correct me if I’m wrong). It may not be profitable on its own but it sure as hell is bringing value to Google’s other services. All the while, it’s actively getting worse for end users (more and more ads, no more dislikes, not respecting video quality choices as well as it used to, hiding quality settings behind obtuse menus on mobile, no home page without watch history…)
Ultimately, “line no go up big like last year grug mad” is what matters to Google’s shareholders and what ultimately drives their decisions. I firmly believe that we’d still be having this conversation if YouTube somehow making a profit with ad blockers on, so fuck em.
killeronthecorner@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Not in the slightest. They want to have their cake and eat it, meaning they want you on the platform but using it their way. Why else would they put so much effort into this fools errand of subverting ad blockers?
lemmyvore@feddit.nl 11 months ago
If that were true they’d have restricted YouTube to logged in people.
Prandom_returns@lemm.ee 11 months ago
What? They are trying to get rid of people with ad-blockers, not random by-passers that view 5/5 ads.
victorz@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Could you explain that? Don’t views or engagements count if you’re not logged in?
lemmyvore@feddit.nl 11 months ago
I mean if they really didn’t care about random visitors and cared more about making people watch ads. There’s a very simple way to accomplish that, they only let you watch if you’re logged in, and give your account a temp ban if you’re blocking ads. But since they’re not doing that they obviously see some value in anonymous visitors.
_s10e@feddit.de 11 months ago
No.
Im pretty sure they are fine with free riders when they are not too many.
Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
Does that mean I should pull all my content?