this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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Imagine all the cool stuff we could be doing if we weren’t wasting the time of hundreds of engineers figuring out how to shove ads in people’s faces.
Machines could be doing all the work. We could have clean energy , air ,water and food and shelter for all....
If everyone were a paying subscriber we could actually do all those things. No one wants to be ad supported, including the people at YT. But there are bills to pay.
ah yes all you have to do is spend like 100 USD yearly, ever year, and pay for features you don't want, just so youtube can maybe stop posting ads.
It’s not a “maybe” for me. I haven’t seen a YT ad in years. That’s Premium.
that's great, how long until you think youtube makes a new premium tier that starts showing ads?
Or that one notable bug where premium shows you ads.
my point is that there is no guarantee in the quality of the service, they have no legal requirements for it (here in murica at least)
I have no thoughts on the hypothetical of what if YT starts showing ads on Premium.
I’m using lemmy right now and it’s not ad supported and I’m not the product.
It’s always weird to me when people post on lemmy and just assert something that implies lemmy is impossible, bro your using it right now!
LOL I donate to my instance, “bro.” Lemmy costs money. You’re just freeloading for the moment.
yeah, the admin of the instance chose to do so, they often accept donations, so you can stuff money there if you feel like it.
I'm not getting a "free lunch" the instance admin is giving me a free lunch at their own expense, and being compensated in other manners.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/jul/02/us-cities-and-states-give-big-tech-93bn-in-subsidies-in-five-years-tax-breaks
They get loads in governments tax breaks and they data mine the fuck out of us so fuck them and their ads.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/19/social-media-companies-surveillance-ftc
I'll continue to block them as long as we can and then move on to something else if we can't. By paying you are just rewarding this exploitative behavior.
If you simply must pay for something then donate it to a charity instead. These companies do not need your money.
I did $390 in charitable giving last month and paid $23 for YT Premium. My priorities are just fine so please don’t lecture me on how to spend my money.
Ads give more profit than subscriptions, since if you would adjust subscription price to match ad income, too less people would buy it at that price.
Source: Netflix and Disney Ad-supported tier analysis.
The ratio of income to bills is way lower on our side than YouTube's.
We need that money more than they do.
I can point you to some people who need your money more than you do. Are you going to give it to them? Why not?? Doesn’t money flow to those who need it??? Isn’t that how this works??????
i can point you to the basic fact that if i just keep my money, i can very well do more work with that money that i keep, rather than just giving it away to other people.
Money doesn't flow to those who need it, money flows to those who get it through commerce most effectively.
That’s exactly right!
It doesn't, which informs the rise technical mitigations of YouTube's terrible ad schemes. YouTube isn't interested in a more egalitarian society but serving its shareholder masters, and it sucks even at that.
YouTube subscriptions are not a good deal for the consumers, so they're not going to be popular, which might serve to explain to you why everyone is not a paying subscriber, nor will they ever be.
All you have to do is look at other streaming services which are subscriber-only to see the truth of what I said. Even the ones that have ads are not doing backflips to cram them everywhere as the other commenter complained, because ads are just supplementary revenue, not primary. The subscription model is incredibly strong historically and currently. It’s patently ridiculous that you think you can wave it away so easily. You’ll also notice that most other subscriptions are cheaper than YT Premium - because they’re going for subscriber scale where YT has a powerful ad business in place that subscriptions replace.
If you’re not following me, I’ll simplify: if everyone on YT has to subscribe, as on Netflix, it in fact would cost a lot less. But you don’t, so you get ads up the wazoo.
I’m even more baffled by your criticism that YT cares more about shareholders than creating an egalitarian society. Thats true of literally every business including the one you work for. YT never said they were trying to make society egalitarian. Where do you even get that shit from?
I’m even more baffled by your criticism that YT cares more about shareholders than creating an egalitarian society. Thats true of literally every business including the one you work for. YT never said they were trying to make society egalitarian. Where do you even get that shit from?
The pissed-off engineers that develop effective adblockers, for which there remains robust support.
Much like the west coast oyster monopolies of the 1880s that were scourged by oyster pirates, YouTube is fighting a losing battle.
PS: I take you're aware of the cord-cutting epidemic of cable television, yes?
Piracy, cable TV, cord cutting.
You’re throwing a lot of words together without making any argument.
YT is winning the battle against blockers as evidenced by the extreme vitriol toward them here right now.
YT are winning at business: they are massively successful.
YT are winning competitively. Just listen to the cries of monopoly around here. That’s how strong YT are.
YT won my business by making something I use every day and mostly can’t find a substitute for.
What are they losing again? They’re not even losing the ad blocker users, who clearly and obviously depend greatly on YT or they wouldn’t be so mad that their free ride is over.
Explain to me again how someone who writes an ad blocker gives you the idea that YT is supposed to be creating an egalitarian world? That part made no sense.
Nah, I'm good.
I think an athiest would have a better chance trying to deconvert a Catholic Bishop than I'd have getting you up to speed.
You can’t make your point. And I’m not impressed by this attempt to make it look like you’re just choosing not to because SWISH SWISH you’re just too cool for that.
Well, I certainly can't make my point to you. You have bested my patience, my fellow lemming.
SWISH SWISH you have bested my patience! SWISH SWISH lol ok bye dude
Wow. Is this normal behavior for you?
They’d have more paying subscribers if they didn’t charge more than Netflix for what amounts to user-generated content that they’re getting for free.
They’re not getting it for free. They pay video creators. And they know that the more they can pay them, the more and better content they will get.
And with any product pricing, there is always a balance between charging less to get more customers, or charging more to get more money per customer.
I’m pretty sure YouTube knows more about how to price their service than any of us.
barely, most of that payment is from premium subscribers and memberships, people who spend their own money on this, youtube gives them a share of the ads, sure, but ads are basically a fraction of the majority of most youtuber incomes these days.
It used to be free, it’s not like the majority of YouTube users voted yes to google takeover.
It’s not like YT is a democracy LOL
And YT was never free. It has had ads from the beginning. Perhaps not its very first months as a startup but those were supported by its seed investment capital so obviously a special and finite circumstance.
YT is ad supported. It always had been. Free services need to make money somehow and ads are one way. It is baffling watching people realize this for the first time because they’ve been shielded by their ad blocker for years, but dude, here outside that little bubble, in the real world, this is how things work.
Thy take as much as they can get and pay as little as they can, using AI for both:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EmstuO0Em8
Quasi-Monopoly makes services worse for everyone!
Everyone in every aspect of this economy tries to get the most while paying the least. I swear people in here are bitching about absolute economic basics that they themselves are guilty of.
If you hate monopolies, go pay for Nebula and Curiosity stream like I do.
I do pay for Nebula, it is not the Solution to our Problem. We need regulation.
I'm not terribly sympathetic to arguments about covering costs when it comes to corporations. If they were just looking to cover costs or even just make a reasonable profit, there are all sorts of arrangements we could come up with that would be acceptable to most people.
But they're not trying to do that. Profit isn't enough for a corporation. They need to make the most profit. And then after that they somehow need to make more than the most.
So they put in ads. But that's not enough and oh look there are more places we haven't put in ads, we should fix that. Oh look, our studies show that if we make the ads more obnoxious in these ways they increase this number by 3%. Oh wait, we have all this info we got from spying on people, why don't we sell that too? Hey guys, we've heard you about the ads. Have we got a solution for you! For a small ~~protection payment~~ subscription fee of $10/month, you can get rid of those pesky ads we know you don't like! Oooh sorry everyone, the price of the subscription went up again. We promise this is all necessary. Oh by the way, we're adding ads back into the service. But don't worry, wait until you hear about our NEW subscription tier! (I don't think that last one's happened with YT premium yet, but it's happened with cable and most of streaming at this point, so I wouldn't put it past them.)
There's no way we can have nice things while this is the driving force organizing where our resources go.
That’s fine. No one needs you to be.
What are those? No, really, this is the crux here. The whole rest of your comment is about growth capitalism generally, and I agree it sucks in many ways. But until you can reasonably provide a working alternative to property ownership, we will continue to have things like rent and lending. Investment is a form of lending. And yes YT shareholders don’t give a shit about anything but more and more and MORE insane profit. Because to succeed, a company has to not only profit but profit above expectation, rewarding the speculative investments others have made in them.
It’s foolish though to think that YT’s management are the source of this desire for profit. It’s their shareholders. YT really want to deliver the best product while making a good living, and their staff are also minor shareholders to some extent.
But your problem is capitalism. And if it took ads on the pause screen to get you to see the issues with growth capitalism, then sheeit you are late to the game and I won’t wait up to hear what your alternative suggestions are going to be. I’ll just point out that you waved your hand at that subject and then moved on like we wouldn’t notice.
I don't know why you'd assume that. I'm pretty staunchly communist from a mix of seeing our current problems and understanding history enough to know that this didn't start yesterday. But if it takes companies being really obviously greedy for some consumers to see anything is wrong, it doesn't hurt to try to focus their anger to a productive understanding of the problem rather than whatever other nonsense they might get drawn to.
As far as alternatives. I'm always up front with people in saying that I don't have precise answers for what our future ought to be after capitalism. That's a difficult problem and up to everyone to work together to figure that out. But there is no future where we stick with capitalism. Or at least, not one we'd want to live in for very long. It's a cruel system and it's going to be responsible for ending the human habitable environment if we don't do something about that. People need to understand this and they need to understand that tweaking around the edges isn't going to fix the issue.
The thing about if they were ok with a reasonable profit is a thought experiment or rhetorical device more than it's a proposed solution. It'd be nice if it worked that way. Capitalists want us to think things do or could work that way. Hence corporations saying they NEED to cut costs or raise prices while continuing to make increasing profits. But it's important to understand why it could never work that way, at least for very long.
I would love to be a subscriber if Google could guarantee that they won't take my viewing information and then sell it to other advertisers or data brokers, or use that info to push ads on behalf of those brokers in other Google products.
As it stands now, why would I pay with my money AND my data? Google shouldn't get to double dip.
This is not double dipping, because the value of your data is factored into the subscription cost.
Personally, I don’t care that much if I watch YouTube videos about Game of Throne and then see ads for HBO House of the Dragon in Google search. But that’s me. I don’t have this overinflated concept of how precious my YT watchlist is to me.
An old coworker of mine started a company that was an ad network that paid YOU for your data every month, drawing from the ad revenue they got from using your data. The fact is that your data is not worth very much at all on the open market.
With some exceptions I think all the “BUT MY DATA!” is disingenuous pearl-clutching. Because everyone ITT has a credit card in their wallet right now, and that company has sold their personal information and purchasing habits thousands of times over and they’ve never cared.
But suddenly they have to sit through a YT ad because their ad blocker got killed, and now people suddenly care about their data, and fairness to creators, and capitalism, and privacy!
All those are just ways to legitimize the fact that people lose their minds when they have to wait 15 seconds to get the thing they want for free. They’re ashamed to admit that they are that childish, so they make it about their deep, deep commitment to data integrity.
People need to take a step back from their devices IMO.
There's a lot of implicit assumptions about me and my ego in your reply by grouping me with some nebulous group of "childish"... tech privacy moralists?
You're right, people should take a step back from their devices...
Don’t worry, I spent zero seconds considering who you might be. I’m arguing with your point of view as expressed here by you but also similar statements by others.
This is ad driven economy and bar must go 🆙
"Line go up" is the animating force of the age, the critical philosophical principal around which our entire society is arranged.
Gives me a fucking headache.
All time high all time!
I choose not to confuse their values as mine or that of my community.
Unfortunately, the powerful have the power so they're arranging my life too. To the best of their ability, at least.
You're right that we should not confuse their values for our own, however.
Agreed. I really hate it when people see the problems in the world, fall for misanthropy, and blame everyone, most of whom are blameless beyond their failure to put their lives at risk to change things.
People are great. We've done great things. We're a species who's defining advantage is cooperation. None of what we see today would be possible if most of us were greedy, hateful, idiots.
People can be lead astray. but who can blame them? We've created a world more complicated than any one of us could fully understand. It's bad enough that a handful of psychopaths can take advantage of that, we don't need to add to it by making it seem like everyone's at fault for not instantly bashing their heads in.
I really appreciate this take. It's good-hearted and makes good sense. I'll try to remember it going forward, when cynicism overwhelms.
Thank you.