I'll be curious to see where this ends up going, as I doubt the community will take this lying down.
The few times I've had to go without an Ad blocker, I've seen just how bad the Ads have gotten - they're almost the same as regular TV Ad breaks now!
... And then YouTube Premium is just not a good deal in my eyes, £12.99 a month is an awful lot to pay just to not see Ads.
The majority of of people using it will most definitely take it lying down as they're most likely not tech savvy enough to install a browser extension on a laptop if the only thing on the page was a large red install button.
That's why I specified the community, as in the more tech savy folks that would care about this, because I know that the wider public is surprisingly tech illiterate
And then YouTube Premium is just not a good deal in my eyes, £12.99 a month is an awful lot to pay just to not see Ads.
I think this includes YouTube music (at least in my market it does) which makes it fairly good value for money if you already subscribe to a music streaming app.
I use ublock on my phone as well. I set it up to play through FF and never access the YouTube app. Did it for my gf when she complained of ads, and then did it for my self it was so easy.
I don't remember the last time I saw an ad between us.
I don't watch YT from phone much, but I find Newpipe for videos to be a better experience than browser (it is also much lighter). And similarly Innertune for music.
Because Netflix didn't dismantle the capitalism machine.
Capitalism can never fully disrupt itself. It's always cyclical. If bundling eventually made it more money, then it will eventually return. If the response to that is to innovate something that gets around that form of bundling, then that "disrupts" the market, in the short term, only for the market to settle back to bundles.
Because as long as the idea makes more money in a capitalistic society, it will never die.
They get the most money by just donating trivial amounts to their Patreon. That should be the standard. I assure you $5 one time to a creator is more than they'd ever make off you with Ad revenue.
Content creators get nothing from a subscription To YouTube premium.
This is not true. If you're a free user they're getting a share of the ad-revenue. If you're a premium user they're getting share of the membership fee. The more videos you watch from a creator the more they earn.
Also. Do you have any idea how expensive it is to run a video hosting platform? Especially at the scale of YouTube. There's a good reason Lemmy doesn't have videos.
I don’t care. I don’t wanna watch ads, ever. The point is, YouTube will never be able to stop ad blockers. They can try, and the only ones who get hurt on the content creators.
Edit: and whining, “boo-hoo for the trillion dollar megacorp!” Isn’t going to elicit any sympathies
It is expensive, but it's hard to quantify that expense for a cloud provider like Google. They're liable to use their market prices for cloud services to justify the "cost" when they want to make it look more expensive than it is. They're already building a cdn for all their other services as well, so YouTube's cost is baked into that.
Reddit, by comparison actually pays for cloud hosting for all it's video services and so pays out the ass.
peertube exists. it's activitypub. lemmy is the reddit-like interface to activitypub. but the fediverse definitely has video. it even has live streaming through OwnCast (though i think peertube has livestreaming scheduled to be implemented as well)
I'm not informed enough to know how peertube works but running it is not free either. Nor is running a lemmy instance. Lemm.ee for example has a limit even on the size of images you can upload despite the fact that hosting images is orders of magnitude less bandwith and storage requiring than videos.
despite the fact that hosting images is orders of magnitude less bandwith and storage requiring than videos.
In general, yes, when comparing images/video of the same resolution. But if I compare an 8k image to a low quality video with low FPS, I can easily get a few minutes worth of video compared to that one picture.
As you said, it definitely costs money to keep these services running. What's also important is how well they are able to compress the video/images into a smaller size without losing out on too much quality.
Additionally, with the way ML models have made their way into frame generation (such as DLSS) I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing a new compressed format that removes frames from a video (if they haven't started doing it already).
Used to put up with this back when Hulu was free. Adblockers weren't as sophisticated then, so I had to watch 2 minutes of a black screen every commercial break. Still better than watching ads.
I am excited. This will break my YouTube addiction.
It'll only affect me when I need to fix something I'm unfamiliar with, and it'llead creators to using other platforms for that kind of material, and lower the barrier to entry.
I don't know why Google is shooting themselves in the foot like this. I mean, it'll be profitable in the short run, yes, but this will almost certainly be devastating to their bottom line in the long run if it works as planned.
devastating to their bottom line in the long run if it works as planned.
Google knows their service is addictive and is banking on people being willing to eat an unlimited amount of shit in order to watch a bald man from Vancouver spend 12 minutes talking about his Peloton ride that morning. Realistically, they are probably right. There is no competition to YouTube. Hasn't been for years. And there probably never will be ever again. Capitalism trends towards natural monopolies as infrastructure and complexity of operations makes startup costs prohibitive.
Sample the color of a specified pixel (or something recognizable in the streaming format) every 30 frames from the original video.
Store collection of pixels in a database and share in a peer to peer network or stored on invidious instances. Because the sample size is small, and the database can be split up by youtube channel, the overall size and traffic should remain low.
When streaming a youtube video, if the plugin detects that the pixel in the video doesn't match the one in the database, automatically skip until where the pixel matches the data in the database.
That is prone to error, just a pixel can be too small of a sample. I would prefer something with hashes, just a sha1sum every 5 seconds of the current frame. It can be computed while buffering videos and wait until the ad is over to splice the correct region
The problem with (good) hashes is that when you change the input even slightly (maybe a different compression algorithm is used), the hash changes drastically
Yes, that's why I'm proposing it as opposed to just one pixel to differentiate between ad and video. Youtube videos are already separated in sections, just add some metadata with a hash to every one.
I think that downsizing the scene to like 8x8 pixels (so basically taking the average color of multiple sections of the scene) would mostly work. In order to be undetected, the ad would have to match (at least be close to) the average color of each section, which would be difficult in my opinion: you would need to alter each ad for each video timestamp individually.
So, how will content creators be reimbursed for the long hours they put into creating YouTube videos? There are honest people out there who made content creation their job. I say that to express I'm not talking about content farms, clickbait creators or "Mr. Beast" types - those are all media companies, although they also have bills to pay.
I love this mentality. This idea that forcing someone who hates ads to watch a bunch of ads somehow magically makes more wealth happen. The whole thing is a bubble desperately trying not to burst by basically forcing more ads in more places where it actually makes very little difference.
I wonder if creators are actually going to get paid any better if YouTube forces more people to watch ads on their channels. My bet is not.
Ad-revenue is literally how content creators get paid. If you're using an adblocker (like me) then you're freeriding. They're not getting any money from us viewing their videos.
Nobody is forcing anyone to watch ads. That's the alternative available to people who don't want to pay. The other alternative is premium membership. Which ever you choose makes money for the creators. Blocking ads doesn't.
I hate ads just as much as the next guy but this mentality of expecting to get content for free is ridiculous. That's unbelieveably narrow sighted and self-centered thinking. If subscribtion based business model was the norm instead of ads-based then we'd have none of the issues that come with targeted advertising. On the other hand if one thinks google is evil company and don't want to give them money then stop using their products. Damn hypocrites..
Ad-revenue is literally how content creators get paid
Great. If YouTube removes viewers’ abilities to block ads, resulting in more ads watched, will content creators get an increase in pay?
Again, I doubt it.
I hate ads just as much as the next guy but this mentality of expecting to get content for free is ridiculous. That's unbelieveably narrow sighted and self-centered thinking
You’ve missed the whole point. Ads exist to encourage people to spend money on products, therefore companies profit from paying for advertisements.
Where does the profit come from if someone who doesn’t deal with ads is forced to watch an ad? Do you think that person is just going to decide to spend money?
Secondly, if a creator adds a 1-2m sequence in their video to talk about a sponsor, no one is tracked, no one knows any better if uninterested viewers skip past it, and it’s usually very relevant to that creator’s target audience. I have zero qualms with such a system, and sometimes it’s actually really entertaining.
Morals or not, this is Google scraping at the bottom of the barrel to invent value where there is VERY little to be had. Data-invasive, targeted advertising is superfluous and needs to die.
Where does the profit come from if someone who doesn’t deal with ads is forced to watch an ad?
The creator gets paid for people watching the ads, not for buying the product. For the most part the point of ads is to increase brand recognition which in turn increases sales. Ads work wether you think they do or not. It's among the most studied economic fields. There's a good reason companies spend a ton of money on advertising. More people seeing ads = more sales. I too like to tell myself a story about how I'm immune to ads but I know I'm not.
Data-invasive, targeted advertising is superfluous and needs to die.
I agree. The alternative is paying for the service eg. subscribtion based business model.
Targeted or not - I'm not going to watch ads. If it's a bad service like Instagram I'm just going to stop using it but in the case of YouTube if they manage to make adblocking sufficiently difficult and inconvenient then I'm going to buy premium. I can't blame them for wanting to get rid of freeriders. If I was them I would probably want to too. Blocking ads is like piracy; I participate in it but it cannot be morally justified. I'm effectively stealing.
Creators do get paid a share of the ad impressions. Many also are completely open about it and post videos of how well their videos did and how much money they earned from monetized videos, i. e. videos with ads - this is also why you hear many avoiding e. g. swear words, since YT's auto detection will then flag their video for de-monetization.
But funny enough, that's not what I said at all. The cost of running YouTube and the cost of the creators must be paid (plus creating an incentive to produce high quality content in the first place). That can be achieved by ads or by offering a subscription.
My original question still stands: if you were to build a video streaming platform tomorrow, what would your model for financing operation and content creation be?
Do adblocked videos prevent creators from having another view registered for a monetized video?
I don’t know how to do a video platform. If I had the time and skill, I’d rather make a FOSS, federated platform for creators/studios to host and finance however they want. Odds are they would never be as egregious as YouTube is being, and I’d be less inclined to skip their ads.
Individually, no. But each view not generating ad revenue does still generate streaming costs. If no one would pay Google to host their ads on YT, I doubt they'd keep the platform online.
Now don't get me wrong, the threshold at which Google decides that the ratio of adblocked to regular viewers is exceeding their business model is most likely based on corporate greed, and the recent crackdowns on ad blocking are due to the same reason. I think they're doing fine and there is no need for the recent initiative - but it would be equally dishonest claiming running a platform the size and outreach of YouTube could be done without large investments, one way or the other.
Individually, no. But each view not generating ad revenue does still generate streaming costs. If no one would pay Google to host their ads on YT, I doubt they'd keep the platform online.
Well this kind of renders the whole “if you don’t watch the ads, content creators can’y get paid” morality approach meaningless, don’t you think?
Where is the money supposed to come from? Companies pay Google to put up ads expecting a return on the investment. If Google starts forcing people who inherently avoid advertisements to watch advertisements, what value is that actually supposed generate for either of Google’s customers? I’d just walk away from the screen like I do with regular television.
I don't think that was ever a moral issue. We're talking about large corporations in a capitalist setting, moral is not something to bring up in that discussion.
Also, no one said end users are morally obliged to watch ads. The gist is: some kind of revenue stream must exist so that the operator of the platform keeps it running and the creators are enabled to create content.
A paid subscription is a perfectly valid alternative, as are platforms like Nebula, which use that exact model of paid subscriptions. Patreon is a bit tricky since it only serves the content creator. Google famously shut down all kinds of projects without any consideration for their users, I have no doubt they'd pull the trigger on YouTube if it would serve them.
In a perfect world, ads should not exist at all. It took us decades to even regulate ads that are obviously harmful (alcohol, tobacco, gambling, ads propagating body issues via heavily manipulated images etc.), none of that should be forced down people's throats.
Unfortunately, however, we don't live in a utopia, but in a capitalist hellscape, so when I talk to people, I actually want to know their practical ideas of keeping the show running.
Currently, I couldn't recommend anyone to not run an adblocker, the internet would become unusable due to how intrusive and downright dangerous ads have become, both in content for certain audiences, and as networks to deliver malware.
Simple answers just longing for the good old days of the small web are nothing more than nostalgia and willfully ignore how the internet and the society using it have changed. That's not a practical or remotely useful answer.
We are watching the system change as we speak, and I came here to discuss alternatives. I did not ask a moral question, although I do absolutely believe that people creating high quality content should be paid for their time. I genuinely want to know what people's ideas and beliefs are and how they think the system will continue to work.
It might have sounded like that at first, but I'm not actually shilling for a company trying to increase ad revenue, and I do hate what current ads have become.
Ads should not manipulate or downright endanger people, and there are also cases where we need to find a different mechanism to deliver ads to people entirely - if a podcast (for me, that means mostly audio dramas) advertises itself as immersive and is not on a platform where I can get an ad-free experience, I simply won't be able to listen to it. Being immersed into a supernatural, cosmic horror doesn't go well with hearing about how I should switch my business page to SquareSpace.
I was fine with the "watch these 3 relevant ads in sequence and we leave you alone for the rest of the movie" concept, for example. That to me looks like an indirect form of payment, it's transparent (no obnoxious product placement) and I can enjoy the rest of whatever media I'm consuming in peace.
Content creators should move to a platform that isn't pushing far-right radicalization to kids watching video game streamers if they'd like me to pay for a premium account.
Should you then in turn also not consume content on YouTube at all? If so, great, you're basically not affected by this discussion at all.
As for the topic itself: YouTube definitely has its share of problems, e. g. ElsaGate, unskippable ads in front of emergency medical advice, automated copyright strikes that are incredibly easy to abuse etc., but all those things are completely off topic.
No. They make money if they find a sponsor. I also skip over those sponsors' ads but the sponsors don't know that or they accept a certain fraction of people not watching their ads. I just don't watch ads. If, in the future, that means I cannot watch my favourite tubers' content, well too bad, I'll watch some ad-free netflix series or read a book or whatever. But one thing is certain: I'll rather light my dick on fire than watching ads. I even joined a class action lawsuit against amazon because they want to make me watch ads without my consent.
But if you're paying for Netflix, why wouldn't you simply pay for a premium account that doesn't show you the ads? Is the content from your favorite YouTubers really that bad in comparison? I'll admit, for me, it's absolutely the opposite.
I am subscribed to amazon prime, mainly because of the benefits I have regarding shopping. I might cancel that subscription however. I am really annoyed right now because they changed their return policy and they try to force ads on me while at the same time reporting their modt profitable quarter.
To be honest, I don't think I would mind ad supported YouTube. For me, it's the obvious scam ads that Google makes it really hard and obtuse to report that made me block them indiscriminately.
If it was regulated like TV commercials are, I don't think I would've minded too much. Twitch has basically no scam ads in my experience, I just get a lot of gaming-related advertising which makes sense for a gaming-centric streaming site. Quality over quantity (at least by advertising standards, lol.)
Of course, this is just YouTube and Twitch. The rest of the Internet is pretty fucking awful and they'll need to clean up how advertising is handled before people even think about giving up their adblockers. Yeah, ads are annoying, but people gotta eat.
You are right of course, and I would like to make this point clearer for others in this thread: Nebula can only survive if people pay more than Nebula spends on getting them to subscribe in the first place (think ads etc.) , and if the annual streaming costs are covered (those were a little more than $250.000 / year last I checked).
The tool that works best for getting people to subscribe is direct advertisement by the creators (Click like and subscribe), so Nebula is heavily investing in creator sponsorships, around $5 million a year.
That is the platform supporting the creators via direct sponsorships.
Now that this is out of the way, I'm still not satisfied with the answer. First of all, I wanted to shed light on what, apart from decisions based on moral beliefs and political stance, would be different for you as an end user. Don't get me wrong, those are perfectly valid reasons and in the end, I do believe every decision comes with a certain amount of politics attached to it, but I think those reasons won't sway the masses.
Let me make it clear: overall, I like Nebula as a platform much better than Google as a company. I do not know enough about Nebula as a company to comment on how they will evolve over time. I'd personally love if all my favorite creators. would switch to a platform where I can support them in a more direct fashion by paying a parent entity vs. each creator individually, and where me and people I care about are never exposed to ads.
I really don't care, most YouTubers I watch use Patreon and Twitch subscriptions for the bulk of their finances, think they buy candy with the pennies YouTube sends them.
I occasionally buy merch from them, that's my support.
I think the unskippable and autoplaying ads are the point for me where I start actively finding ways to avoid ads. Anything that tries to force itself in front of my eyes or eclipses the actual content is kind of a no go.
It's not that Youtube creators don't deserve to be compensated (many if whom provide content to YT for free just to share, let's remember) it's that Google needs to find less obnoxious means of serving ads.
I'd be really curious to see the actual numbers of how much Google gets in revenue from YT and how much actually goes to paying creators. I'm betting the ratio is not as slim as they make it sound.
Most content creators don't make money from ads. Google keeps on changing the rules to be able to monitize or keep monitizing their own videos. Google has put ads on videos when the creator did not reach the requirements to make money on ads.
This is why creators have sponsorahips, affliate links, their own merch, Patreon, or OnlyFans. They also use Youtube more as an ad platform for their other social media accounts like Instagram and Tiktok. Depending on the content some creators get paid more on Tiktok.
Yeah, if you listen to any content creator talk about sponsorship revenues it basically eclipses all other form of revenue for them.
I think it was Pokimane who got tired of people donating money and then being assholes if she wasn't basically gushing over them for hours, so she just went "You know what, I don't actually need your Twitch dontations." and just turned them off.
Content creators make thousands of dollars per sponsorship deal minimum if they have a decent amount of viewers. Bigger creators like Ludwig get millions for some deals (Redbull gives him a crapload of money for product placement, for example).
The examples you cited are not individuals. Both Pokimane and Ludwig are basically media companies at this point in time.
And yes, the amount of money you get from YouTube is a lot less, although I'm being told major YouTubers have direct platform deals. But that's not the issue:
In order to even get those lucrative sponsorships, you need the reach of a major platform in order to build an audience - that's not happening without e. g. YouTube.
Yeah, but content creators haven't deplatformed off YouTube. The closest might be streaming services like Nebula, but even those have subscriptions.
YouTube pays little to content creators for hosting the content, but they also pay for hosting the content. I can't think of a case where content creators would pay to host their videos for others to watch for free without ads or a subscription.
What's most valuable to Google is the user data. Google is still able to get a lot of user data even if blockers are on. Ads are really just a way to get even more data. If you click an ad 10 times and buy something just 1 time, that information is more valuable than the ability to put ads in front of you.
I said one was more valuable. That doesn't mean they don't go well together.
Anyway you can use data to nudge users. For example, Google can change search result orders. They can promote one company/research/ideology/party to the top and demote others.
Finding out where certain people are important for law enforcement or press.
Stores give out free wifi to track your MAC address and see where you go in stores. They sell this data, use it to track theives, or use it for better product placement.
Anyway you can use data to nudge users. For example, Google can change search result orders. They can promote one company/research/ideology/party to the top and demote others.
This is advertising.
Finding out where certain people are important for law enforcement or press.
This service isn't that valuable, and extracting the value required is going to be a PR nightmare.
Stores give out free wifi to track your MAC address and see where you go in stores. They sell this data, use it to track theives, or use it for better product placement.
I've no contract with them, I've not made any purchases. They post something online for anyone to see.
They are completely free of locking their content behind a paywall, there are plenty of platforms for that.
But I want to make my first statement clear: no every single thing any human being does has to be done just for the sole purpose of getting an economical profit. That would be the death of humanity.
I still remember 90s internet when we had tons of websites with lots of content that was just there because the creators were fans of such content, no further intentions. Barely any ads or monetization whatsoever. The 'shark' mentality is killing internet.
Sure. But nobody had to invest multiple hours each day into maintaining their Geocities page - there are only so many animated GIFs you could load over a modem connection anyway. Also, are we really comparing the hosting expenses of fucking YouTube with static 90s fan pages?
People expect edited videos from content creators these days. Even someone filming a hobby in their home shop will get barked at for having bad audio quality, if, this week for once, they forgot to charge the batteries on their wireless Rode lavalier mic.
That's why so many content creators do have e. g. Patreon. Many of them are providing peeks behind the scenes and create transparency to show how much effort a single video takes, and even individuals often hire someone to do the video edits for them.
If you're fine watching unedited, 5-10 minute videos that can be churned out with next to no effort, all good. I'm really into 40-90 minute long videos and personally view YouTube as an alternative to obtain the content type I prefer, but I'd rather not sacrifice quality. I also prefer creators who provide a serialized format and upload a video every week - in that way, I guess I'm old fashioned.
This type of content is impossible to make without financial support, which I'll gladly provide one way or the other. However, how much the average person can afford in terms of monthly subscription fees is certainly limited, so a company offering access to multiple creators for a flat subscription fee is absolutely reasonable.
People expect edited videos from content creators these days.
They do not, look how popular meme compilation are.
Even someone filming a hobby in their home shop will get barked at for having bad audio quality, if, this week for once, they forgot to charge the batteries on their wireless Rode lavalier mic.
Hater will hate, welcome to the internet.
If you're fine watching unedited, 5-10 minute videos that can be churned out with next to no effort, all good. I'm really into 40-90 minute long videos and personally view YouTube as an alternative to obtain the content type I prefer, but I'd rather not sacrifice quality.
This type of content is impossible to make without financial support,
Also, are we really comparing the hosting expenses of fucking YouTube with static 90s fan pages?
There were much edited 40-90 minute video before there were ad on youtube. There were high quality page long essay on internet before youtube exist. Do not need ad or revenue or money support to get your content.
In 90s people did thing because passion. Now because passion and money. Still can make thing only because passion, never got impossible.
I've seen people who make money from YouTube, and I've no interest in seeing them continue to get paid. If somebody actually makes something worth paying for, they can take their shit to Netflix or whoever. They aren't going to pay some manchild to yell at videogames all day.
I have seen plenty of people who make excellent content and who I'd consider to be decent human beings. I also used to believe that YouTube was a cesspool hosting only crap, and I think it was via some new hobbies that I discovered the decent offerings.
That by the way is why I explicitly mentioned channels and personalities I'd like to exclude from my claim that creators that should receive financial support to be able to keep creating content.
You realize you could watch every ad on every video a creator puts out for a year and generate them less than a coffee, yeah? If you care go give them 5 dollars.
Fuck, an integrated donation/payment thing on YouTube would go so much farther for Google's profit than ads ever would as well!
You realize I mentioned in several other comments in this thread that I am pretty aware of the financial structures involved in content creation on various platforms? That's also a fallacy, as thousands or millions are watching a given video and it's not on me alone to generate the required financial support, so the value my ad impressions generate is proportional to that number.
You realize I mentioned why donations made by individuals, to individuals, are not ideal and not sustainable? How many creators can a single individual support? Let's say I am interested in 70 creators, should my media consumption cost me $350 a month, or should the cost be divided by all their subscribers and ideally be fairly managed by a platform?
I do care, and I do support content creators with my money directly, thank you. I also happen to have paid subscriptions, although as my other comment mentions, out of necessity, not because I believe that to be an ideal situation (in the case of YouTube, specifically).
YouTube introducing a KoFi - like donation button with minimal UX threshold and minimal processing fees with the benefits going directly to the creator? I fully support that idea.
It could've been. You and me probably would've blocked ads regardless of their content for various reasons, but I'd imagine that Google wouldn't have reached this critical mass prompting this scheme if their ads were properly vetted.
The technologically literate capable of installing ad blockers are the minority, and those who'd do it out of principle are a smaller subset of those
Not scam ads, intrusive ads. A decade ago i read cracked and the only ads were non intrusive sidebar ads or a banner at the top. They didn't play music, they didn't interrupt what i was doing, they just existed. Google, being the near complete monopoly it is, could easily force the standard to return to that and many people would never even go looking for adblockers.
Over the past years I've been reducing my youtube and twitch viewership anyways. Its literally the lowest form of entertainment and its not worth a single moment of ad watching. I'll just do something else. Most youtube content sucks anyways. I don't even remember most of the channels I used to watch.
They're just going to increase their own server costs chasing some tiny fraction of viewers who will do anything to avoid ads. they should be grateful for the adviewers they have.
Man, you're definitely spot on with this. For me, it's a fast, easy source of superficial distraction that I can put on for background noise and don't have to pay attention to. It's ultimately what cable TV used to be for me. I'll even leave on a streamer playing a game in the background on low volume if I'm going to sleep just for white noise. At this point, the behavior and desire for that kind of content is so ingrained in me that it's sort of like an addiction. I wish there were alternatives to youtube, but that era of video content might just be straight up dying for some of us. I guess if anything I'll start fleshing out my plex server with old t.v. shows and just put Gilligan's Island or something on in the background.
Yea, a plex server for idle viewing would be a way better alternative. Just make a custom nickelodeon, comedy central, etc and have it run random episodes of random shows.
I've actually always wanted to do this! Download a load of old school Nickelodeon stabs and episodes and find some software that can play them all together in random order haha... Any advice on how to go about setting this up?
It's actually built into plex. If you have a library of t.v. shows you can just click the Shuffle button and it'll play random episodes. Or you can make Categories of shows and shuffle those. If you're asking how to get started with Plex and downloading content, well....I don't want to get banned for piracy related reasons, so I'll just say that, totally unrelated to this discussion, there's a wealth of resources regarding how to get started with bittorrent and usenet. Which you can use for perfectly legal purposes, like downloading Liinux ISOs and open source textbooks.
I use Jellyfin because it's pretty light weight and straight forward. Just add the shows you want to a playlist, or even just specific seasons, and shuffle play.
Its literally the lowest form of entertainment and its not worth a single moment of ad watching.
I'm just curious, but what type of content would you be watching on YouTube?
I think the platform has come a long ways when it comes to content. Sure, if you're just watching gaming content I'd say you'd be disappointed. It's been like that for a decade now at least. There's a lot of decent content on there though with a lot of it even being somewhat educational.
My viewership has changed so much over the years. I used to watch stuff like diyperks, primitive technology, this guy kris harbour who built a house with natural materials. When I was coding lots of edu stuff.
Im sure there is a lot of good shit, but I just have less energy to wade through the crap. And the continued attacks on ad blockers makes me less willing to want to find channels and communities I would probably enjoy.
I actually can't stand gaming content cause its just spoilers and gfuel marketing as far as im concerned
I see. I simply ask because the platform has changed a lot if you used it a little over a decade ago and I know some people who never got over the transition.
Absolutely understandable that you don't want to spend time looking for anything that might catch your interest though.
Yeah YouTube's real problem is the recommendations are terrible. It tries to ram the most profitable, lowest common denominator swill down your throat until it gives up and just recommends stuff you've already watched.
I'm just curious, but what type of content would you be watching on YouTube?
I literally use it almost exclusively for how-to styles of videos. I had to replace the throttle cable on my riding lawnmower last year. I found an awesome step-by-step video. Stuff like that…
Yeah you're right, YouTube just isn't what it used to be. I miss when people made videos for free because they wanted to share something with the world. Now it's a full time job
Youtube doesn't pay attention to what ads get approved, or where they get served. Ive heard stories of people getting served two hours full amateur movies as ads, Ive heard of people getting soft core porn served as an ad, to actual scams and crypto pitches. It's like Facebooks new AI enabled algorithm. There is actual danger, considering children and the elderly get sucked in to youtubes black hole?
I watched a couple videos on the Diddy case, and a couple days later my whole feed was filled with the worst conspiracy theories and Christian preachers.
I watch one Youtuber talking about pyramids, YouTube fills my whole suggestions with ancient alien conspiracies.
I watched one cover of a song, I get recommended the same song for weeks.
I watch one reaction video, the whole feed turns into reaction videos within minutes.
It's a fight against the algorhytm and it isn't fun. It's incredible how dumb it is after all these years, and those algprhythms are partly to blame that everyone feels more miserable than they are.
I just turn off recommendations (disable watch history) and use a third party app where I can disable recommendations (Grayjay and NewPipe). I just want my subscriptions and search, that's all.
I don't login. Grayjay/NewPipe doesn't send any data to its servers, so they're not tracking viewed content. I also get subscriptions and playlists (again, w/o Youtube account) in addition to the features I mentioned. Afaik, you can't get any of that with addons.
Make a fair payment model. No classic subscription. But pay per watched minute, and when you hit a certain amount of minutes, every additional minute is free.
Do you actually understand how this works?
It’s a beautiful statement and oh so noble, but it just flies against how the world really works.
At some point, maybe not today, but at some point, you’re going to be saving up for your retirement. Your money will be invested; either passively or actively. If active, a fund manager (or maybe even yourself) will be spending time, every single day, wondering how to maximise the invested cash. If passive, you’re letting a WHOLE lot of fund managers make the decisions for you (wisdom of the crowd). Either way, Google better fucking perform or the investors will go elsewhere.
And you’ll be an investor too, asking for Google to do better than anyone else or you’ll take your savings elsewhere.
If investors go elsewhere then they're trading for a higher risk and return ratio than a massive company with rich history like Google. Plus, it frequently performs large buybacks and offers, and even offered a dividend recently. There is always going to be something attractive to investors, here.
Agreed there is a mix of things Google can do to remain attractive. But at the core, Google has to be a better investment than something else to remain invested into.
One thing I genuinely don't get: why does a company making this much money need "investors"? (Other than participating in the make-rich-people-richer scheme)
You aren't an investor if you are planning to resell. Day trading and real investment are totally at odds. It's far better (for retirement) to invest in a stable company and get a set return over time for it. We also don't even need to do that for retirement, the fact that we do is fucking insane.
You’re arguing against the world that is. I’m just trying to explain the behaviour, not necessarily condone it.
A pension fund manager may not move in and out of stocks on a daily basis, but at some point they’re going to take a look at how their portfolio is doing and react.
Millennials and zoomers are not saving up for retirement, barely able to sustain themselves. They're also expecting ecological collapse to cause global famine or their own nation to go full Reich, assuming they're not killed by hurricanes, wildfire or war.
Agreed, many young people can’t save. That’s why I said “maybe not today, but at some point”. I’m not saying it’s easy for young people, I’m trying to explain why companies seek to increase profitability and that almost every investor is self-centred.
First, individually targeted advertisement should be illegal. Instead of trying to figure out who I am and serving me ads based on that, they should only be able to look at server side facts. What is the video? This is how television and radio ads have worked for ages. You have a video about SomePopBand, you advertise concert tickets. You have a video about bikes, you advertise bike stuff. You don't know who I am. Suddenly, the motivation for most of the privacy invading, stalking, nonsense is gutted.
Some people would still block those static ads. If they showed some restraint, I think more people would accept them. But that's a sad joke- no profit driven org is going to show restraint.
Secondly, if they can't ethically run the business at a profit, the business probably doesn't deserve to exist. That or it's a loss leader to get people into the ecosystem.
You do know you can enter into your Google settings and disable all tracking and targeting, right? And you can ask them to delete all information they already hold on you.
Yes right. But what does the investor environment look like today? Profit, not users, is what everyone is counting. If Google says “we’re burning cash in all businesses but search, but hey we’re nice”, investors will take their investments to more profitable businesses.
They actually have a pretty huge net profit margin and what basically amounts to a monopoly on advertisement, so even if their ads reached less intended targets it wouldn't hurt their bottom line much.
Let me buy an API token anonymously, similar to how Mullvad works. I'm happy to pay for what I watch, but I don't want to be tracked at all, and I don't trust their internal settings.
Until that's a thing, I'll watch without an account using an ad-blocker. Give me that experience with the apps I use (Grayjay and NewPipe), and I'll pay.
They could use their monopolies to force advertisers to pay a fair amount for a decent ad instead of taking pennies to ruin the Internet. I never even considered using an ad blocker back when it was just banner ads. Or maybe they could stop being a full decade behind the times and add donations to YouTubers for a cut. If they add value to premium instead of trying to remove value from the base experience they could even triple dip on these ideas.
The internet was a mistake. We had a good run. Lot of fun was had, but it hasn't made anyone's life better. I say we roll things back to the ARPANET days. The internet should exclusively be used for disseminating post-graduate level academic research and DOD projects. Everyone else can read the newspaper on their train ride in their full 3 piece suits to their union job at the business factory.
No, FAANG is killing the internet
We kill them, internet good again
Or else, I laser off the optics from soviet early launch satellites and ... well. .. you know
It's too late now, but only if they didn't put so many ads in the first place, less people would be blocking them. They could also make YouTube premium affordable by removing all the features except "no ads".
Some time ago I would've bought YouTube premium, but it had so many features I didn't want driving up the price that I just didn't. I instead switched to Firefox and ads were gone again. Good job google, drove me off YouTube premium and Google chrome at the same time.
Finally a use case where AI/Machine learning would absolutely make sense. If we can have AI that can generate text or images, imitate people's voices or write code, we can also have a lightweight model that can detect ads and skip them during playback. There's a model trained on SponsorBlock data for detecting sponsored segments https://github.com/xenova/sponsorblock-ml
I'm sure that we can have something similar but for embedded ads.
Give it 5 more years in hardware performance improvements and software/model optimization and I don't see a problem. The important part is that improvements are made public for everyone to use and improve upon instead of letting openai and microsoft take the whole cake
It's called a classifier and it could easily detect an embedded ad. The issue is now everyone needs to run it on their hardware to detect and this will cost some electricity.
Do you understand what we're still talking less energy than the monitor it displays on.
I would bet even untuned VGG16 could do that without even a fine tune. Advertising is starkly different to content and the output is a "ad=yes/no" signal. It's a very small amount of data, probably less than the plain hardware video decoder.
It's also not a new type of load, it runs off the same power supply as any computer, a slight capacitive load, it won't even change the grid powerfactor.
Ads have definitely added more load on electrical grids in aggregate than locally hosted and lightweight models, especially given that ads are fucking everywhere all the time. Websites, apps, the servers, even 24/7 electric billboards. I'm not worried about a few nerds using slightly more electricity sometimes for their own benefit and joy (it's still less power than gaming), as opposed to a corp that burns through power and breaks their climate pledges (Microsoft) for the benefit of their bottom line and nothing else. Corps don't get to have a monopoly on AI that was built with our data, only to have it fed back to us to pull more data and siphon more money.
People will find a way to get around it, I could see buffering a video for 5 mins or even downloading the entire video ala locally playing podcasts, then using AI or some type of frame analyzation technique t to skip ads. Or just skip them like good old fashion Tivo from your player.
server side video ad injection means they could vary the placement of the ad, so things like sponsorblock which relies on the segment being in the exact same place all the time would not be very effective
If the YouTube interface restricts you skipping during certain parts of the video, an ad blocker can detect that and skip over it anyway. Otherwise, I myself will just skip over the ad.
it won't though, because you can just remove that 30 seconds at the beginning, which is almost definitely going to be very different than the rest of the video in a number of ways. Notably, there are likely going to be UI differences during and after ads play, as well as video playback alterations. Ad's aren't going to be the same quality as video itself.
It's possible that they're transcoding them into the video itself, but doing that would be catastrophically bad and have such a massive cost that it simply would not be worthwhile.
They are transcoding them into the video. Sponsorblock had to make a quick change to discard submissions from users that have been identified to be on this trial system, because it affects the video length, and as such - makes it impossible to have consistent segments
i highly doubt it. I would think they're probably doing some UDP packet voodoo bullshit.
Though it likely appears as transcoded.
The sheer cost of them being transcoded into videos is immense, even if they're live encoding every video.
What happens when you get an ad you need to takedown and remove? You're on disk transcode is suddenly useless now, and you need to make a new one, easy enough, you can just do that in the background, but this also means your ads are baked into each video, which is less than ideal, unless you're constantly updating them.
And if you're doing live transcodes, that means that you have to do this for every view on every video, and i'm not sure that's sustainable.
I suppose you could probably do a cached live transcode system to bring down the overhead, but i can't imagine it's easier than just pulling some voodoo networking bullshit to literally inject an advertisement.
AFAIK there is no need to re-encode, since Youtube videos are stored and served in chunks anyways. The change is that they are now slipping in the ad chunks as if they were a part of the normal video chunk stream.
That's me too. I was a family subscriber for years. Some of those years it was just myself on there too. But the price hikes and interface degrading was infuriating.
We'll just copy the video and recast without ads I guess? I do watch several videos many times over for diy, so it would be relatively painless to just download and modify.
When I have to wade through sixteen different "Would you like to join YouTube Plus!?!?!?!" pop-ups every time I whisper the words "online video" in the direction of my phone, I'm rarely inclined to use YouTube to begin with. Its a bad fucking service.
My TV doesn't pull this shit on me. I get Show -> Ads -> Show -> Ads in regularly spaced intervals, like I'm a civilized human being. I don't get WOULD YOU LIKE TO GET SLIGHTLY FEWER ADS!!!!! GIVE ME $8$12$15 $20!!!!! every time the fucking thing turns on.
