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.
Comment on YouTube warns it might make your viewing experience worse if you don't turn off your ad-blocker
PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world 7 months agoDing 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.
_number8_@lemmy.world 7 months ago
darthelmet@lemmy.world 7 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:
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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.
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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.
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whats_all_this_then@lemmy.world 7 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.
dannym@lemmy.escapebigtech.info 7 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 7 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.