I create content that goes into YouTube. I generate a tiny bit of revenue from that. I have no say into how YouTube treats my viewers. If you watch the ads, awesome, I get some money. If not, I’m just glad you watched the video.
The majority of content on the platform is made up of channels my size and smaller. Most of us are getting paid pennies.
But YouTube doesn’t care about us. They want to appease the larger studios.
Youtube doesn’t care about the collective “you” that is its namesake. It hasn’t for over a decade. Itps all about the big studio level productions. It’s no better than the mainstream television networks at this point.
Maybe its due to my age, but I use YT for tutorials on diy or fixing shit. I get 20s in, then whammo, ad. Just as the guy is focusing in on the area I need to see. I am watching a 5min video and 2min of ads… it is ridiculous.
Tubemate. Tubular. Newpipe. Ublock if nothing else.
Don’t forget that if you have to rewind a part to see something the creator blew past that you needed to see and you get another two ads. Fuck that noise.
I think you’ve got the right approach, FWIW.
Not sure that big business favouritism is the intent, but it’s definitely more lucrative for them. Especially with Vimeo and other alternatives out there.
I remember when streaming took off in a big way - some on YT and others on justin.tv (later Twitch and now Amazon’s Twitch) - and I thought you’d have to be objectively bonkers to rely upon an opaque and ever-changing algorithm for your financial future. Some have gamed it well, but it’s pretty easy to see how they’ve survived - fake shock/reaction content, alt-light or worse content, polarising opinion, thinly-veiled advertorials, and so on.
I’d argue that there are a couple of studios that are still mostly focusing on making good content, not click bate.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I think YouTubers like MKBHD are generally playing it straight. Trying to stay on top by getting better and better content.
Although, these people tend to burnout eventually. They have to keep running a faster mile.
I definitely admire the integrity and the effort.
But, economically speaking, you get what you incentivise for: if you can game the system and get the click/eyeball ratio, then they’re going to do that.
Yeah, I’m just saying that some exceptions break through. Some YouTubers make content that is so good that people outside of YouTube consistently share the shit out of it. They don’t need the click bate for the initial boost, they get the boost from sharing off the platform.
Patreon and Merch ALSO allow a lot of youtubers to survive without having ro rely on Monetization from Youtube
They need to separate out the sites, big budget dailies and content creators, your run of the mill every day creators and a video uploading site.
Theyncant be all things, simultaneously pushing shorts and videos over 15 minutes.
This just in, people don’t like ads. At all. Most people.
It is time to find a new business model that works. I’m not smart enough to know what that is so that you don’t piss off users, but whoever figures it out will be a billionaire.
Back in the early days of youtube, I didn’t mind them. Just a few ads here and there. Nowadays, the internet is barely usable unless you have an adblocker.
I don’t mind ads in the sidebar or on that little banner across the bottom of the screen sometimes. Its when the ads completely cover the content I’m trying to watch/view and/or start auto playing at obnoxious volume that I get annoyed. (Also fuck people on metered connections right?)
I would pay for premium IF it was a reasonable price.
I don’t want shitty music bundled or whatever fuck else they are calling it now JUST youtube.
AND here’s the big one, I want the fucking downvote count back and sponsor skip. Most videos have ads and fucking sponsor segments which are also fucking ads. I’m not paying to watch that.
And downvote count is absolutely crucial to be able to detect bullshit videos quickly.
Google is offering a shit product and asking a premium price. Fuck em.
Maybe like a subscription where people could pay a fee to avoid ads?
That is absolutely a solution. But what I’m talking about is a way to monetize while keeping the service free but without showing ads.
This is the billion dollar idea. If not trillion.
There is no such thing as a free service.
People need to eat, bills need to be paid, shelter needs to be provided and unless people can have these at no expense and create things for pure passion & share for others to enjoy then they need the means to pay for these things.
The internet has whittled this down to a few basic models:
- Pay the service directly for the content (subscriptions or 1 time purchases)
- ‘Free’ content and they serve you ads which they are paid for by companies trying to sell something to you
- ‘Free’ content and they sell every bit of data they can scrape from you to companies which are again, trying to sell something to you.
If you could find a way to do anything without having to pay for our human needs then would it be a trillion dollar idea or would money be meaningless now when people wouldnt need it to live & enjoy their lives?
I pay for YouTube and use FreeTube and NewPipe. I try to pay for whatever services I use. I think this is the way, either pay or let the ads play. I do this because the YouTube app is trash for many reasons mostly having to do with trying to funnel me to the money making bits.
There are greedy corporations making the user experience worse and doing everything they can to wring every penny they can. Ultimately, I attribute this to the wall street investor model. A company can be making money and still be losing because their revenues shrank from the prior quarter. That is a broken system that will only eat itself. That being said, people gotta eat and that includes the janitors, etc… at Google.
Point is, its a mixed bag. There are people on the other end making the product you are using, AND there is a soul sucking company making it worse for both their customers and their workers/creators. To be clear, there is something to be said about how poorly Google supports their creators. In many ways, they are taking advantage of the creators that use their platform. How is it that Google is making so much money in ads, but creators have to open Patreons?
I still don’t think we should just expect stuff for free.
Tangentially, I need to be better about helping support the open source projects I use, especially the smaller maintainers, to be honest, but I do send to a few and I encourage everyone to do so as well as much as they can.
edit: Grammar
There is no such thing as a free service.
But there is such a thing as a monopoly.
Where are the youtube competitors that keep prices competitive?
The credit card companies should have invested heavily in micropayments. If I could just pay a tiny non subscription fee for a bit of media I would do that in a heartbeat.
Most people
Then how did google make money?
After they killed YouTube Vanced, I switched to New Pipe and never looked back
For those wondering, ReVanced launcher short after that and is even better than Vanced.
Google’s a dumb ass company and I strongly suspect them to be Americas replacement to the echolon program mainly due to the timing.
Seems profits getting a bit more relevant than intelligence to them these days.
Yeah I’d rather go without YouTube than deal with the ads at this point they went ridiculous with it a long time ago.
Today, for the first time, I had 30-second ads on my smart TV like wtf. Is that even legal
ELI5 why google won’t pull reddit on youtube API?
YouTube already has ToS on their API and has paid tiers. But a lot (most?) of the third-party apps and tools bypass the API and directly scrape the site.
Go to any major publication, and I mean absolutely any one, and there is a solid chance there is at least a single YT embed.
If they try to Reddit their API they’re going to lose much, much more than just giving it away
X(Twitter) did it, that’s why i am little concerned.
Ads have almost always been part and parcel of the YouTube experience. However, there’s a point at which ads become so frequent, so irrelevant, and so relentless that they start hurting the user experience. We’ve been past that point for a while now.
Ironically, without an ad blocker it’s hard to read the Android Police blog. I invite anyone to try.
I turned mine off just because of your comment and I counted 15 on that page. 🤢🤮
Allegiance to Google is what’s ridiculous, they haven’t deserved to exist since their IPO and the parasite they are needs to be pulled off the internet
You can fix the problem by just…. Not using YouTube.
I’m so addicted to YouTube it’s gonna be a very rough time when I can no longer watch without ads, because I’m sure as hell not watching ads.
