This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
After Amazon said there'd be more ads recently, yep, more ads tonight. Done with it. My living room is not a marketing platform. It's finally time to go back to the convenience and ease of piracy.
The new model is based around pirating Clarkson's Farm and donating to farmers. That's the point anyway. No need to bring Jeff into it.
People upload whole MasterChef seasons on Youtube. Legit
Ad revenue is like Crack to corporations. Once they get a taste for it, it's all downhill from there.
Mostly because it's the easiest money they'll ever make and it's more profitable than subscription models. Gotta see those numbers go up at all costs.
That just makes sense though? The legit sites have to pay for, fund, or in some way support the content which does cost money. The piracy sites obviously don’t have that cost so they don’t need as much income.
The piracy sites also pay a lot less in infra, since they rely on the user to store, seed to others, and serve the content to the local users. All that infra is offloaded to the user.
Sorry, what exactly kind of content are we talking about? You know, the one "legit" sites have to pay for but piracy sites don't.
Fun fact: a lot of the content you see on big sites are advertorials, this means some company writes a fluff piece about how their lastest product can solve all your problems, and then pays the site to publish it. In print, you even have the option to have the ad use the same layout, fonts, colors etc. as the real content.
This means a portion of a site is not filled by content that had to be bought, but actually brings them money.
Do you think that Amazon gets its content (movies on Prime video) for free? Or do you think that piracy sites pay for their content (stolen movies on torrent sites)?
Edit: To answer you more directly, YouTube pays creators a cut of the ad revenue, and Amazon/Netflix pay the movie/show creators through licensing deals.
That's some ground-level hanging fruits - do you know any piracy websites the size of Amazon or Netflix? Sure as hell I do not.
Piracy websites are usually pretty limited in scope. Places like some shady porn repos, pirated games and movies, etc. Of course there are some giants like thepiratebay but even they are nowhere as large as the ones you mentioned.
All of these, especially the big players, have high costs of maintenance and advertising. Just like their "legit" counterparts in size.
That’s normal, it’s the same infrastructure cost then the licensing costs
Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.
It indiscriminately pollutes whatever environment it’s conducted within, and causes secondary harm to non-participants by incentivising hoarding of PII in the cheapest and least secure manner.
It causes genuine harm, I'm visually impaired and I've wandered into construction zones because advertising billboards are mounted near and "road work ahead" signs and everything is all just bright and bold.
I don't know what's official, everything is competing for my attention but I have very little capacity to dedicate my full attention to a visual sign. The end result is incredibly fatiguing, seeing a bright sign and straining to ensure I read it because it's colours look important, nope, it's an ad, that was a waste of energy, oh look another one with the same blurry colours and type setting it's probably the same ad.... Nope that one actually needed my attention, and now I'm somewhere I shouldn't be and I'm in danger.
I'm also hard of hearing, but fortunately audio adber in the public isn't as bad, but anyone who's hearing impaired knows how fatiguing it is to try and filter through noise. It's the exact same for visual impairment.
Adblock is a cure for migraines.
Amen, I just need IRL adblock now please.
I have legit never bought a single thing because I saw and ad for said product. I don’t know who is out here making these campaigns so profitable
Here's a really horrifying fact about ads, they don't expect you to go right out and buy their product. Ads target your subconscious and manipulate your way of thinking. There was a study done by some university and tested by a few people across different fields of study that proved this to be correct. I wish I could remember off the top of my head where this was published. If you do a little browsing you can probably find it and you should because you can't trust a stranger like me to properly relay the information.
Brand awareness gets you subconsciously
I don't know, I distrust all YouTube ads content creators slide into their videos, because the products are either useless to me, disappointing in real life like the "fruit smells" rings for water bottles or sketchy with some fear mongering like the VPNs.
Yeah I'm not gonna be paying for NordVPN. They've got this much money for ads and when buying 2 years at a time they're cheaper than, say, Mullvad? Suspicious.
I do like some of the channels' sponsor segments though. Internet Historian is great, OverSimplified can do pretty good ones. The Map Men are pure gold. But I've never bought into anything they've shilled at me, nor do I feel like I want to.
Sponsor block is a browser addons that addresses this niche
I dunno, I don't just ignore ads, I find them repulsive, like my scam-alarms go off even when I know that it's probably a legit product. Seriously unless I get a recommendation from an actual person, the brand I've never heard of feels safer to me then the brand I saw a cheap ad for on some janky website. Maybe it's because so much of the stuff I had growing up was knockoff/store brand, so I've hardly ever actually experienced anything that I saw an ad for.
ublock origin. I don't care if some website dies. Whole internet is turning to shit anyways, just let it all burn
I'd love it if we started the internet from scratch again with no search engines, just webrings and link books and geocities pages everywhere
neocities!
We should also bring back the LiveJournal days as well. I was too young to ever really be able to get into that kinda stuff, but I've been enjoying writing posts for my 100% fictional company on InsaneJournal, no matter how little, if any, people see it.
Ublock does such a good job at blocking the old janky torrent sites, especially compared to the increasingly aggressive and intrusive new shit.
