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hark ,
@hark@lemmy.world avatar

I'd rather not use youtube than give them money for it or even sit through their intrusive ads. There are infinite ways to entertain myself.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

I mean... that is the point.

Pay for premium, watch ads, or don't watch at all. You and Google are both in agreement.

interdimensionalmeme ,

Google should have thought of that before trying to paywall the zeitgeist.

If there's a bouncer holding culture hostage, I'm going to sneak in the backdoor.

SailorMoss ,

Yeah, I’m not sure I agree that YouTube wants their platform to shrink. Even if you don’t watch ads you are still giving them your data which they can monetize.

Personally I would be willing to pay for YouTube premium but not under the current terms. 1. If I’m paying for the service they should no longer collect and sell my data. 2. Allow me to have a YouTube-only account not connected to other Google services and 3. The current pricing is a bit high.

They can offer these terms or I’ll continue to use them logged out with Adblock. Or they can continue to enshitify and eventually their platform will start to shrink which will make the data they sell to advertisers less valuable.

BigFatNips ,

Their platform won't shrink. You and I may care enough to stop using it (very skeptical personally tbh) but 99.9999999999999999999999 percent of people don't give a flying fuck and there's more users being born every day.

TheDarksteel94 ,

I was actually offered by Google to separate my Google Services and their associated data from each other. I immediately took that offer, of course. Might just be an EU thing tho, idk.

tabular ,
@tabular@lemmy.world avatar

Not quite. Google doesn't want competition or content creators to be elsewhere.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

There is nowhere else. The only other companies that can consider a YouTube scale product already noped out.

pkmkdz ,

There are free alternatives like odysee, but creators have no incentive to move there

tabular ,
@tabular@lemmy.world avatar

A decentralized apporch: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Yeah...

How often do images "not load" when browsing lemmy? How often do sites get hugged to death even now? And that is kilobytes of data.

Video is a mother fucker. It always has been. Those of us who are old enough to remember will understand WHY youtube was such a revelation (or why so many porn sites still have a huge thumbnail archive...).

And it is why the various "youtube alternatives" like Nebula or (sex pest adjacent) floatplane don't have free video. EVERYTHING is paywalled because free video would make their hosting costs increase exponentially.

And yes, in theory, distributed hosting can lessen that burden. Anyone who has played a listen server heavy online game will already understand why that is a pipe dream.

tabular ,
@tabular@lemmy.world avatar

What types of games are listen heavy?

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

A lot of smaller multiplayer games and older live games. Also a not insignificant number of fighting games.

If you ever noticed rubber banding or games straight up being broken if the wrong player is the host: That is your friendly reminder of how shitty most people's internet setup actually is. People piggy backing off the starbucks on the first floor is a meme for a reason.

GTG3000 ,

I feel like the true decentralised approach to video that may work... Are torrents. Don't know if PeerTube works that way, but if you're allowing people to eat your bandwidth with direct streaming, you're gonna run into problems sooner or later.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Have you ever tried to torrent something less popular? One seed with shit upload getting ganged up on by ten leeches. Five of which disconnect the second they hit 100%.

Regardless, a torrent-like approach would work for large creators like Michael Reeves where thousands of people are going to be willing to act as seeds indefinitely. Someone like Matt Yuan might be lucky to have enough seeds for the latest two videos.

And it also doesn't work for anything live. And becomes a huge mess for premiers where people need to wait for the upload to propagate. MAYBE the latter could be handled with pre-seeding with an unlock coming at the release time but... it is a matter of minutes until a kick level creator nopes out by uploading CSAM "for the lolz"

GTG3000 ,

Oh, I know the experience pretty well. The fun fun fun of having something stuck at 98% for a week or more :D

I was thinking, if the creator themselves would seed their stuff it could work - although I admit it'd have to have some kind of seed schedule and maybe some heuristic to see which videos were still available or not. There'd be problems with bandwidth, but I think it would at least allow a decentralised video network to exist, even if it would feel a bit more like watching anime in year 2010.

And yeah, fair point. I don't really do live streams so I didn't think about them. Honestly don't know what a solution for that even could be, in terms of "everyone hosts a little bit to spread the load and price".

Don't really think it'd be that big of a mess for premiers, but then again I don't see a big issue in waiting a day to get good content. Y'all are spoiled with cdns and social media /s :D! In my experience torrents propagate pretty quickly so it could still work. Think the bigger issue would be the fact that people have preference for different resolutions, so you'd end up with massive torrent downloads that have 4k, 2k, 1080p, 720p, etc. Or multiple torrent files for different resolution. The worst outcome would of course be "creator just dumps 8k 60fps content on the network and tells you good luck".

Either way, I won't pretend like torrent net could match the service of youtube right now - but I do think it could actually make a video network actually work, without prohibitive costs for the hosters and subscriptions for the basic users. It'd still be nice to support creators and the trackers but those aren't as big of an ask as "host hundreds of 4k videos per creator forever".

[edit] as a last minute thought - I think I know another reason why torrents may not work so well. You'd have to have an app or a browser extension to use them, which limits the accessibility compared to "open url and watch".

hark ,
@hark@lemmy.world avatar

I specified intrusive ads. They could have non-intrusive ads, like a little banner or something. Instead they put up multiple video ads before and during videos. No thanks.

YarHarSuperstar ,
@YarHarSuperstar@lemmy.world avatar

Don't forget after! Man I hate that when I have to sit through an ad if I don't realize the video is all the way over yet, or I don't change it in time

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

I mean, it is great that you have very specific rules in terms of what kind of ads you will tolerate. You should write a letter to John Google about that.

But also? We have been through all this before. Back in the day, ads on websites were incredibly unobtrusive. A small png at the top of the page that everyone skimmed past. But people still wanted to block those because only the evil sites were sellouts who needed to pay for hosting and blah blah blah. Which more or less started the ad war we have going to today. First they were simple jpegs. Then they were animated gifs. Then they were annoying animated gifs. Then they became flash ads. Then they became flash ads about how this shitty age of empires ripoff totally has boobs. And so forth.

Because if people aren't looking at ads? The people who buy ads know that. So we get ads that are harder to look away from. Until they are ads we can't look away from because they are embedded in the videos themselves.

And, until we live in a post scarcity society where energy is infinite, it is going to cost money/resources to host web content. Ads are still the closest thing to an "effective" way to pay for a lot of that. And that means a war to have ads that get past ad blockers and ensure eyes get on them.

hark ,
@hark@lemmy.world avatar

What really started the ad war was the endless drive for greater profits. Let's say I accept youtube's terms and sign up for premium. Sooner or later they will introduce ads into premium as well. We've seen this process happen with many other services before. I didn't start using an ad blocker until quite a bit after pop-ups were rampant and malware-infested ads became an issue. There's a point where it becomes too much and people will seek out alternatives. An entire generation grew up with convenient streaming services and they're generally less knowledgeable about piracy than the generation before them. That will likely change as those streaming services continue to jack up prices while making the experience worse all in the name of profit.

Again, there is an endless supply of entertainment these days. If companies think they can endlessly jack up prices and/or worsen the experience, they're contending with practically infinite supply, the consequences of which are obvious in when it comes to supply vs demand.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Were the ad companies interested in increased profits? Of course they were. But they also aren't a charity. And when they are buying ad space for a web comic but having zero impressions, they are going to be pissed. They aren't running a charity (well... some actually ARE but that is a different mess).

Again, this has been going on well before subscription models were even a thing.

That said, I do agree that it is a generational "problem". Youtube has been around for almost 20 years and, arguably, in its current form for almost 10. Significant parts of the internet have no memory of anything else. Like, my niece and nephew literally throw tantrums when they see tv commercials when their father is watching a football game. Whereas my sister and I remember the fights over who got to use the downstairs bathroom during the second commercial break in The Simpsons that week.

But... I am an old. I remember heartfelt blog posts from some of my favorite webcomics and gaming news sites that were basically "Look. Hosting costs money. Especially as we are getting a lot more popular. I go out of my way to curate what ads we run on this site and have an inbox set up in case a company sneaks a bad one in. Please whitelist me in your ad blocker so I can keep doing this in the evenings".

And... I dunno. It is just REALLY frustrating to watch people pretend they care about... anything all while dicking over "the little guys". Because Google is going to get their cut. The pewdiepies of youtube will also get their cuts because they have literally been doing this for years in the form of sponsored videos. But the low/mid tier creators? They aren't getting the massive sponsor deals (unless they want to do raid shadow legends or better help) AND are going to not be getting their ad revenue or youtube premium money because no ads were run.

Olgratin_Magmatoe ,

That'd be well and good if they didn't have a monopoly.

xavier666 ,
@xavier666@lemm.ee avatar

It's not a pure monopoly by choice. While it's true Youtube has a monopoly in terms of number of creators, viewers and content, it's still not a profitable venture. I heard it was burning through money to keep up with the sheer amount of content they have to deal with. Youtube is doing all this monetization now because they have ran out of VC money and upper management decided that it needs to be self-sustaining. Even the obscene amount of data Alphabet is gathering from Youtube does not create enough revenue to generate profit. But it's a "too-big-to-fail" product now so Alphabet will continue to invest. Competitors saw all of this and just noped out.

Other commercial video services, like Nebula, have popped up but they are subscription-oriented right from the get-go, like Netflix. This means they have a very small audience and it will take years to build up an audience like Youtube. So I don't see them growing, at least in the near future.

Brickardo ,

This very much feels like disloyal competition. If you burn through your money in the hopes of sweeping out the competitors, and then you have to dial back on your competitor's practices, it's a dead giveaway you've done something fishy

foggenbooty ,

Yup, but that is quite literally the name of the game in Silicon Valley.

hedgehog ,

it's still not a profitable venture

Source? My understanding is that Google doesn’t publish Youtube’s expenses directly but that Youtube has been responsible for 10% of Google’s revenue for the past few years (on the order of $31.5 Billion in 2023) and that it’s more likely than not profitable when looked at in isolation.

ealoe ,

I guess, no one NEEDS a video streaming platform. It's not like a transportation or a food or power company monopoly, it's one specific form of entertainment. Try going outside?

Olgratin_Magmatoe ,

I guess, no one NEEDS a video streaming platform.

Nobody NEEDS social media, but when a social media does something harmful, they need to be regulated.

Eggyhead ,

I keep saying it. Privacy invasive, targeted advertising has got to be barely worth the cost of maintaining it. Why else is Google trying to put more ads in places, kill ad blockers on chrome, force expats out of subscriptions, and experiment with unskippable ads if not to try and invent some kind of additional value to advertisers out of nothing.

deweydecibel , (edited )

Because the investors/stockholders in the tech industry started tightening the belt and demanding profitability from these huge tech companies. What's happening at Google is happening everywhere: the avenues for extracting more profit from their apps or services are being scoured and taken advantage of. Prices going up, advertising increasing, free features removed, etc. Different strategies all around, but the pattern is clear.

YouTube has never been profitable, but Google was ok with letting the rest of the profits from its other divisions subsidize YouTube's losses so it could remain free. They did that to choke the market; no other company could handle the sheer scale of it while offering it for free. As long as Google ran YouTube for free with relatively few ads, no competition could ever possibly come to exist.

But because the shareholders are demanding profit now, and because Google itself is struggling on multiple fronts, the time to force YouTube into a profitable enterprise has come at last.

And this is what it looks like.

As for risking competition, at this point, I don't think they care anymore. Competition in the web service and software space seems to be a thing of the past. Users are intransigent, algorithms favor the oldest and most popular services, and content creators seem to be incapable of separating themselves from their abusive platforms.

I also have a theory that Google is using YouTube as a way of rallying all platforms and services to combat ad blockers more fiercely. If they can beat them on YouTube, other sites will dig their heels in. There's a long-term strategy here to nuke ad blocking permanently. That's what that web environment integrity shit was about, and you better believe that will be back with a new name.

YarHarSuperstar ,
@YarHarSuperstar@lemmy.world avatar

Enshittification

xavier666 ,
@xavier666@lemm.ee avatar

I have a very sinking feeling that websites will be streamed in the future (SHTTPS) and it will be pioneered by Google :'(

ThePantser ,
@ThePantser@lemmy.world avatar

So a person is not allowed to be part of their home country and get service and then move? What if their job stays the same and they don't make any extra? Evil google.

chiisana ,
@chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net avatar

Operation costs differently in different regions. Advertising spend differs in different regions. You’ve moved from a region with cheap operating expenses and no ad spend to another region with more expensive operating expenses and higher ad spend. Congratulations on your move, now the cost to provide you service is different, and you’d need to pay more to cover the operating expenses + expected margin.

Alternatively, procure a local credit card (I.e. the same one you used back home), billing address (i.e the last place back home), and always do everything through a VPN back home. Then you’re at least using services from where the operating expense reflects the pricing.

This is just business, and should be expected. Food is dirt cheap back in Asia, they’re more expensive here in North America. Like it or not, if I’m living here, I need to pay the prices here. If I don’t want to pay the prices here, I can move back to Asia.

Badeendje ,
@Badeendje@lemmy.world avatar

Except food is a physical good that needs to be transported, while the service is still provided by low wage workers from across the globe.

If a corporation gets to provide the service from where it's cheaper, they can't be mad people buy it from where it's cheaper.

catloaf ,

Internet isn't free. It takes copper or fiber cable, switching and routing equipment, labor to operate and install them, and electricity to run it all. Those costs are also lower in other countries.

So if you subscribe in a low-cost country, does it make sense for them to let you use the high-cost infrastructure?

Badeendje ,
@Badeendje@lemmy.world avatar

It is just some Telcos that price for data usage and put in usage caps. But this is only a way to price gauge customers. In the EU most ISPs operate without datacaps and are much cheaper month to month than in the US (my 1gb symmetric fiber connection without datacaps costs around 30 euro per month).

Sure a data connection in a datacenter is more expensive, but is either shared across datacenter customers or a customer gets their own. And again, global players have framework contracts with other global players.. so maybe Orange Business Services provides the internet connection for their DC operation globally.

The cost for the things they have to source locally is highly overestimated. Usually budgets they spend locally on stuff like advertising are much higher.

chiisana ,
@chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net avatar

Service provider must acquire hardwares for the data centre at local vendor pricing.

Service provider must hire someone local to work in your local data centre.

Service providers need to pay local electricity and bandwidth rates.

List goes on. Just because you don’t interface with the local aspects of business doesn’t mean they don’t exist and add extra costs.

If you want to pay lower rate, as I stated earlier, make your narrative work: use local payment methods, billing address and use the service locally to the locality you’re paying in. Then they’ve got nothing to argue against you as you’re using services in that lower cost region.

Badeendje ,
@Badeendje@lemmy.world avatar

Except the hardware is purchased using a global framework contract that uses the volume as a reason for deep discounts.
It gets put in a rack by a local guy and then remotely provisioned by some person from a low cost country.
Electricity in datacenters is purchased at wholesale prices and muchuch cheaper than what consumers pay...
The list goes on and on.

The higher prices in countries has only very marginally to do with the higher costs.

Money grabbing corporations will charge what the market will bare.

chiisana ,
@chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net avatar

Without violating my NDA with media companies (YouTube being one of them, incidentally), all I can tell you is you’re wrong about these. I’ve been in this exact sector for over a decade and the operating expenses are much higher comparatively speaking, and the objectives are different depending on region.

If you’re so inclined to pay the discounted rate, make the narrative work so they have no way of flagging you. Otherwise don’t be surprised if you’re asked to pay local rates.

Badeendje ,
@Badeendje@lemmy.world avatar

So, where does it differ? Cost of hosting the machine and the data?

chiisana ,
@chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net avatar

On purchasing servers; I don’t know about Google specifically, but most media partners I’ve worked with doesn’t have global acquisition as an option for hardwares — not because they don’t have the purchase power/volume, but rather the vendors have region specific distributors with their own sales teams and pricing. Even if you have the personal contacts of VPs high up the chain, someone from IBM China cannot even sell to companies in Canada, and vice versa, for example.

On people side of things… With YouTube specifically, you’re also not only dealing with their own DC but getting their hardware into local ISPs centres. Logistics around that is not something cheap remote labor can arrange, need actual boots on the ground to facilitate.

Ad sales is also something that’s kind of localized. YouTube has American teams selling American creator inventories for example. Not something that’s outsourced out.

So yea… Although from the outset it’s all just “YouTube.com”, there’s actually a lot of localized touch points that creates different costs to provide service in different regions.

Badeendje ,
@Badeendje@lemmy.world avatar

When I did it before, our company bought the hardware in bulk. We prep it, provision it and have it good to go. Then ship it off to wherever. PM has the local DC staff (if they provide that service, else a local IT company install the box and bring it online. The moment it is online everything is managed remotely. The local install costs is usually a few 100, once, just like the shipping.

We even shipped full racks (assembly required) with a complete connection diagram. All it needed was power and 2 internet cables everything else was done already.

If companies like google expand, this will surely be similar. But then at even larger scale. I cannot imagine them going around trying to find equipment everytime. You just have a contract with dell/HP/IBM/NetApp/Oracle and ask your account manager to ship you x number of type A server.

BradleyUffner ,

They are perfectly free to do that. They just have to resubscribe from their new home country at the new rate. Just like with telephone service or cable tv. It's not like they will get in trouble or would be prevented from moving.

henfredemars ,

Man I knew something like this was going to happen. Just be glad Google doesn’t block your access to all their services or just outright delete your account. On the bright side, you’d be set free.

stoly ,

I’d have expected this to happen years ago.

OsrsNeedsF2P ,

Blows my mind that to this day, companies don't realize it's a service issue. Like it's straight up regressed. Adobe and Microsoft used to encourage piracy to help their bottom line. Now you have stupid PMs who realize they can get a good performance review by talking about how much money they'll make/save from doing stuff like this

SnotFlickerman ,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

They realize it's a service issue, they're trying to corner the market so that they don't have to care that it's a service issue.

YouTube pretty much has that market cornered. It would take a lot of capital to start up a viable competitor, especially one that didn't resort to ads and had some other kind of monetization scheme to support the sites existence and pay for all the storage servers.

Dark_Arc ,
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

This really is not a service issue. This is not a privacy issue.

YouTube as a service is ... actually a great service, it pays creators well, it's fast, it has decades of content, and it has tons of features.

It's monetized with ads, you either watch those ads or you pay them. Using a VPN to get a lower price on the subscription is not a service issue, that's abuse of regional pricing, and no company would accept that.

OsrsNeedsF2P ,

no company would accept that.

Except for a company that understands going after these people won't benefit them?

Dark_Arc ,
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

Literally read about regional pricing and how important it is. It's incredibly ignorant to be against regional pricing.

The alternative to regional pricing is people just don't have access at all.

Jericho_One ,

You're getting down voted, but you are mostly correct.

I feel like the amount of ads and/or length is a little excess these days, though.

The thing is, Google isn't dumb. They've user tested this strategy and they know it results in higher revenue.

And the enshitification continues...for those that don't pay

jabjoe ,
@jabjoe@feddit.uk avatar

You can pay to have less ad, but you're still also paying with your data. Bet pretty soon it will be pay and have ads, or pay more again. They have a captive market. They can extract and extract.

Dark_Arc ,
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

I feel like the amount of ads and/or length is a little excess these days, though.

I do agree but their costs have also skyrocketed because the resolution and frame rate of videos has skyrocketed.

Linus Tech Tips did a video about this ... which agree with his conclusions or not, he paints a clear picture about how YouTube is more expensive to run than it used to be https://youtu.be/MDsJJRNXjYI

Google also isn't in the business of "running things at a loss in hopes of future profit" anymore ... so they need YouTube to be profitable. Maybe it's "too profitable", maybe they could cut down on the amount of advertising they use ... but you're absolutely right that they do test this stuff and find the threshold between "annoying but profitable" and "annoying but we're losing users."

More competition is always good ... but Google isn't stopping competition from showing up, just like Valve isn't stopping competition from showing up, they're just providing a better service that creators keep coming back to (because it's ultimately good for those same creators to get their content out there and monetize it).

xavier666 ,
@xavier666@lemm.ee avatar

Using a VPN to get a lower price on the subscription is not a service issue, that’s abuse of regional pricing, and no company would accept that.

The internet's most beloved company, Steam, also bans people for abusing the store using VPNs. So as much as I hate Google, i find nothing wrong with this.

RmDebArc_5 , (edited )
@RmDebArc_5@sh.itjust.works avatar

My main concern is that they sometimes serve ads that redirect to porn, even if you aren’t signed in, and that’s not the type of ad I want to see, especially if I’m watching a video about cooking. By this alone I wouldn’t want to use YouTube, but as they practically have a monopoly on video streaming it’s not really viable to boycott them without giving up on user generated videos

tabular ,
@tabular@lemmy.world avatar

YouTube doesn't want your money.

wreckedcarzz ,
@wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world avatar

and other hilarious jokes you can tell yourself

tabular , (edited )
@tabular@lemmy.world avatar

They want you to pay a higher price but since you have a choice of paying nothing then the message seems clear to me. You can see comedians on there for free, they tell real jokes.

wreckedcarzz ,
@wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world avatar

...whoosh

tabular ,
@tabular@lemmy.world avatar

no u

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