They are a way of stealing your thoughts and your happiness. Ads are mental abuse. Always block them.
Comment on YouTube Tests Showing Ads When You Pause a Video, Calls it ''Pause Ads''
NutWrench@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Ads are a way for corporations to steal your life from you, 60 seconds at a time.
HowManyNimons@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Boiglenoight@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It’s also a way to pay for providing a service. We hate it, but short of everyone paying for YouTube, it’s how they make their money.
Now double dipping is where things get questionable. If you pay for a video service AND they run ads. /Ripley flaming eggsacs
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
Yes, but that didn’t excuse trying to force an infinite number of ads on people.
Podcasts are supported through ads and you don’t see people complaining about it, programs to block them, and Podcasts trying to subvert ad blockers. Why? Because they have a reasonable number of ads, with clear ad breaks, that are indistinguishable code wise from the rest of the podcast so you can fast forward through them. Oh, and when I turn it off it doesn’t keep paying audio at me.
This is like a service charging 10x as much and you defending it saying “you have to pay for the service somehow.” Yes, there’s paying for the service, and then there’s the service being greedy and milking every last bit of money they can out of it.
YouTube made $31.5 billion in ad revenue last year, and they’re still demanding more. Will these “pause ads” reduce the number of other ads users see? Will it help find other improvements of the service? Or is this just an attempt to keep building infinite growth in a finite system?
At this point I would be thrilled if YouTube went out of business because too many people were using ad blockers.
Boiglenoight@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I can skip through podcast ads with ease.
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
Yup, and somehow Podcasts still manage to be successful.
Yet for some reason people expect me to believe YouTube will go out of business if the ad doesn’t force me to stand up in front of my webcam and say “McDonald’s” before the video resumes.
Tja@programming.dev 6 months ago
Bandwidth is expensive.
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
Google does not make a lot of information available on their operating costs, but from what I was able to find it looks like people are estimating Google spent over $2 billion for servers and bandwidth in 2018 for its network services including YouTube.
YouTube generated $31.5 billion in ad revenue in 2023.
YouTube is covering it’s costs just fine and doesn’t need to force more ads on everyone in order to turn a profit.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I hear this, but I’d like some stats, particularly considering I’m already paying for my bandwidth.
girthero@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It would be the last straw for me as a premium subscriber. Many of the channels i subscribe are putting their better content on nebula anyway.
Boiglenoight@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I feel like that’s where it’s headed. Doesn’t matter what we’re talking about. A shining exception is private company Valve, which has proven time and again that it’s a model for how to treat customers.