Even if they keep the screen black for 30 second to a minute, I'd still gladly wait in silence than be subjected to advertisements.
If they ever make it impossible to watch videos without first watching ads, then I'll just leave the platform. I have no loyalty to YouTube and I'll sooner dump the platform and move on to other video sites than deal with enshittification and ads.
Actually most of my videos are just boring things that I find interesting, and I get just as many views on there as I did on YouTube. And the autocaptions are waaaaaay better.
What I like about peertube is it's just people uploading for the love of it, not content farms and AI slop chasing a quick buck.
Edit: oh yeah and not having multiple ads on my videos.
But they offer an ad free plan that isn't expensive, and the service is really fast and reliable, and comes with YouTube music as well. Why pay for streaming sites that still give you ads like amazon or peacock, but won't pay for YouTube?
I don't pay for streaming sites. 🏴☠️ And I definitely won't give YouTube any money. I've always been able to browse their videos without paying a cent. I'm not about to start now.
Besides, I don't like how everything has become subscription services nowadays. You used to be able to pay once and own a product. Now you need to pay monthly to have temporary access to a constantly changing library. No thanks, I'll only spend money on things I can own forever.
I love ad free music on my car, and no ads on my phone and pc, i and support company's they allow my to get this service. You enjoy pricing every company is right to go to the ad models because people won't pay for the ad free versions.
Why pay for streaming sites that still give you ads like amazon or peacock
I don't? Anyone who pays for a service to show them ads is a rube?
I would actually consider paying for a service like Youtube if it truly was as simple as that, but it isn't. Even if they aren't showing ads after your buy premium, they are still collecting, training on, and selling your data and habits. This is payment. I don't believe in double-dipping; if I'm already paying in my data, then I'm not going to give you money or watch your ads.
If you want to show ads without harvesting data or offer a way to pay monetarily that stops ads and data harvesting, then I'll watch ads or buy. But I absolutely do no accept double-dipping. If I'm already paying, I'm not paying again.
Not expensive? I just checked. It's 8€/m for me. Which means 96€/year.
Maybe that's not expensive for the USAians that earn hundreds of thousands per year. But it is expensive to just remove a few ads that can be easily blocked. It won't even stop the Google tracking, it just stops the ads on YouTube. An ad blocker will also block the tracking.
The way I see it, don't make your thing free for 20 years if you want people to pay for it. At this point, it's as natural and free as a summer's breeze in our minds.
not OP but personally I watch maybe 2h of YT /month. Because I only watch one dude who posts about monthly, then the rest is just random links I'm clicking from a post or something. I donate to the guy periodically. The other links half of them are news clips or something that I could prob just get from their site.
The one-size model just doesn't fit my use case. I'd pay for a per-time-watched plan if it was reasonably priced but it doesn't even exist.
Honestly I could do without it entirely. Personally.
I’m fine with waiting 10 seconds at the beginning of a video. I wonder how much YouTube would save (by reducing bandwidth, smaller caches, choosing slower storage) if they didn’t have the goal to start the video virtually immediately.
You can tell they're deliberately causing the delay by the way it pops up instantly and sends you to a page about turning off adblockers. The experiencing interruptions message used to send you to a page about ISP network performance...
The best part is that Youtube ad revenue is low enough that everyone who can is doing their own sponsor segments, so paying for Youtube to remove their ads doesn't remove a lot of the ads. The only way to an ad-free experience is adblock+sponsorblock.
I was happy to pay for YT Premium when there was a loophole so you could sign up from a far cheaper country. I paid about £6 a month for the family plan, purely so I could watch on Apple TV without having to tolerate adverts.
Then they closed the loophole, shitcanned our premium, and demanded £20 for the same experience. We had Netflix at the time, which was cheaper. So I made a little app as a frontend for yt-dlp, and downloaded what I wanted to watch into my Jellyfin server.
I'll never understand why people are proud to waste their life watching ads. Or are proud to use adblock and steal the content being posted by small creators. You're really sticking it to the little guy, great job.
Ok, so you can never use any google product ever again! If you ever again in your life watch a Youtube Video remember what kind of Hypocrite you are!
This also goes for TikTok, Instagramm, etc. (Any plattform that has User generated Content & uses Ad's)
The people saying "just pay for premium" don't seem to understand that in the beginning YouTube was free and had no ads. When google purchased it they promised to keep it that way. Then they slowly started with ads. At first they were pretty unobtrusive banners, then a short skippable preroll then multiple preroll then unskippable preroll. The reason I refuse to pay for premium is because Google created this issue and is now selling the solution. I refuse to be a part of that. It has nothing to do with the creators.
ReVanced and Grayjay do the same thing but for free and are open source so long as Google keeps trying to engineer enshitification the proud people of the open source community will engineer a solution.
Hmm weird take. Yes these are solutions to the Ad's problem from the user side but they are just UI Wrapper for Youtube so they don't have any costs for hosting & providing all the content. So yea they don't need to monetize.
This doesn't however fix the problem for Youtube itself. How are they supposed to pay for cost & make a profit?
I totally agree that Youtube with all the Ad's is unusable (I'm using an AdBlocker) but Youtube is still a Profit orientated company so how do we fix this dilemma.
Youtube Premium feels not worth it to most people because Youtube was always "free" so paying for it now makes people go like "WTF?". So Ad's & enshitification was/is the only way to make a profit for Youtube. I don't like it either but this is reality.
If you have a solution for them I'm sure they would pay you handsomely for it.
Peertube is a solution, it is an open source peet to peer video hosting platform. But in truth having good competition is a way to force better practices, and if open source is the best option people will go for it if they know about it. linux, thanks to valve and Microslop's poor idea of what people want (and governments leery of Microsoft and Trump's close association decoding to have their own OS for internal use at least), have gotten a small influx of users as a whole, but with more users the more open source solutions to compatibility will be produced, and hopefully if you are looking for the YouTube equivalent you'll try peertube.
The cost of hosting YouTube itself doesn't pay for itself unfortunately. They could get away with it back then because the internet itself wasn't that big. Therefore, we need to KICK THE NORMIES OUT OF OUR INTERNET. WE WERE HERE FIRST, REEEEEE
Yes, it is. Start by offering unsustainable ad-free video. Drive competitors out and monopolize the market. Start turning the screws. Classic tech bro bait and switch.
But you yourself literally just argued the impossibility of it running ad free indefinitely. If you attract customers by knowingly offering a level of service at a cost you know with absolute certainty that you can't maintain, then yes, it's a bait and switch. It's deception and manipulation. Classic bait and switch. Youtube isn't special. They're just Walmart.
And you're just wrong. There's no other reason to offer a service temporarily for free than to use it to drive out competitors. That strategy only has any value as a means of driving out competition.
The people saying “just pay for premium” don’t seem to understand that in the beginning YouTube was free and had no ads were born after the 2008 housing crash
I don’t think this is as simple as “they’re too young to know”! I’m a 30+ year old man, and I was around 15 when YouTube first came out. I was a huge fan of the early days, when YouTube was free!
I am absolutely fine with paying a monthly/annual fee for ad-free access to perhaps the best compilation of human knowledge and entertainment which has ever been compiled in one place. One reason I’m cool with it is that premium views pay the content creator more than the equivalent ad view.
Sure, YouTube “created the issue” of ads. But if it means supporting the creators and removing a barrier to videos, I’m fine with the price.
People who only watch two or three 20-minute videos from the top of their recommendations on their home tab may have no idea the platform is as sloppy as scrollers know it to be.
My favourite unexpected bonus from switching to Linux has been a completely ad free youtube experience. Not entirely sure why this magic is happening but I love it.
Easily the best video streaming app. Uses sponsorblock on youtube as well. Lets you consolidate all your video feeds in one place. I wouldn't bother using Nebula without this.
I doubt they’ll ever actually do it, just threaten it constantly.
They’d rather have people without accounts, and/or using adblockers keep using the site. If they started actually cracking down, then it would create a significant pool of users who would use some other platform. They’d rather eat the losses of some people not viewing ads then push a significant amount of users to a potential competitor.
Much like how Microsoft hasn’t cracked down on unlicensed windows installs because it would push a significant amount of people to look for an alternative OS.
well, I don't think people would actually move platforms if that happened. reddit did some stuff that everyone hated and it's still absolutely massive while the alternative, Lemmy, is small af. that's not even considering the difficulty of making an alternative to YouTube.
The difference is that Reddit was still largely usable after the API changes and most affected users weren’t getting banned. Some people have a high tolerance for ads, but a lot of people would find YouTube unusable without an ad blocker, and if YouTube was banning people, they’d be destroying a lot of the inertia against going somewhere else.
If we say that something like 20% of users on YouTube are using adblockers, that’s a big enough addressable market for a competitor to seriously take off. Enough to attract content creators and VC funding to get it off the ground. In the end YouTube would probably win, but it would be after a few years of actually having to compete. The revenue loss over that time period isn’t worth the short term gain of getting some small percentage of users to watch ads.
If YouTube felt like it could get away with banning people using ad blockers and requiring an account to watch, they would have done it a decade ago.
Do they think they are essential and believe I will not simply forget they ever existed?
May very well be, but that will be in line with their out of touch and deluded policies.
I do not agree with their changes & policies but I think you underestimate the market share Youtube has in this area.
Also you are not the average Youtube user (being on Lemmy and all) so you should think about how the average user interacts with the platform (they don't care about Ad's & don't know how to install an Ad Blocker).
I think Youtube can do a lot more shit before normal people would start to jump ship, but even then what are the alternatives for them? Peertube etc. don't have the content they watch...
Sure they have a huge market share. That's simply from being the first video-sharing platform and being from Google.
There is nothing unique or irreplaceable about them and plenty alternatives do exactly the same thing now.
Only better without ads.
Problem is there are too many and divide the small leftover market share between them.
When/if that's fixed people will not look back.
'normal' people choose VLC now and other FOSS.
YT is not their favorite sportsteam, they have no loyalty to them.
On the contrary. If someone insists on playing YT music for friends and it's interrupted by an ad, everyone's annoyed.
And content is shared on as many platforms as they can since it's free and they want as much viewers as possible.
hmmm? Sorry I was busy enjoying my favorite creators on invidious with sponsorskip. Not sure what you all guys are talking about. Youtube is so good when you remove Youtube from the equation.
You do you. I like my YT Premium. Many of the creators I watch there simply don't publish anywhere else, and I don't have time for ads, especially if I'm watching on my smart TV.
This used to be the case, but it's a different equation now. Ads used to be one or two per video. Fine, I get there are bills to pay.
Now it's pure greed and pushing us to a subscription for a service they purposely made shitty so we would think exactly what you are. 4-5 ads, with forced ads interrupting the videos, and auto redirects to more ads after the video fonishes. Unskippable multi-minute ads.
And if you're thinking "well then just pay for it", tell that to Netflix, Hulu, and all of the streaming services that were "ad-free" until they decided that actually, pay twice as much or watch ads (even though your paying).
So while I understand you're saying, you're assuming Google will play fair. They won't. They will up the price, they will still force ads, and it will get worse. I'm taking a stand now saying enough is enough. I'm not rewarding them for enshittifying the service.
This is the future - independent creator channels and collectives. In truth we consumers might end up paying slightly more, but vastly more of what's collected will go into the hands of the actual creators and creatives than to a bunch of suits who do nothing.
I am also a Nebula subscriber and preferentially view creators there if the content is also on YT. I purchased a lifetime subscription to Nebula; I hope I get my money's worth.
My YT subscription page (https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions) is also just what I've subscribed to, in reverse-chronological order. Unfortunately, that's not all the YT I consume, plenty of after-video recommendations, and sometimes I intentionally visit the main page, which is all algorithm. I do need to work on that -- near-ending algorithmic recommendations are probably not the best thing to spend my limited life time on.
No one is assuming anything. I cancelled my netflix when they started that shit and stopped watching prime. These are services you can turn off when the terms dont align with your approval. If/When google tries the same shit ill cancel that too.
I decided to keep Netflix (and just pay for the ad-free tier), but dropped prime because there was some content that was not available ad-free, and UBO (et. al.) was unable to strip them.
So you refuse to pay because they MIGHT do something bad? That's a pretty weak argument. You're taking a stand against... What? You were never a paying customer in the first place, and they have not enshitified YouTube Premium in the over 10 years I've had it. In fact, I still pay a grandfathered $8/mo for my account - which is grace I was never given by Hulu or Netflix as they repeatedly jacked up the price over that same timespan. Seems to me they've earned the benefit of the doubt.
They actually did. They called it Google Play Music, and Google TV/Google Play Videos. I paid for those. Youtube Music and Youtube premium are the enshittified versions of those, and they will continue to make them worse.
I will concede that the YouTube Music app started (and might still be) worse than GPM was in the end. But I'm not sure it could be considered enshittification. Yeah, the YTM app itself was kinda shit, especially at first - but they didn't make the service materially worse and charge more for features they took away. They didn't jack up the price to coincide with the "new" service, they just consolidated the two separate services into one. They didn't introduce ads. They didn't silently take down a ton of the music offered and leave the price the same - they still have the same 100M tracks as the other guys, and you ONLY get music from those other services.
I agree and get where you're coming from on this example - but I think people use the term enshittification more broadly than it's actual definition, and in my opinion this doesn't fit.
I actually find the value to be worth YouTube premium. YouTube music works crazy good on my cars wifi and infotainment, and i get 4 users that i can add to my family plan so now me and my wife and kids gets all ad free on any device. And i watch now YouTube that i do Netflix, and netflix cost almost the same for only 1 login.
Personally i support any company that provides me an option for AD free service. I can't stand companies that charge me, and show ads.
I don't double-pay. Until Google comes out saying that Premium halts not just ads but also data harvesting, I'm not interested. I'm already paying Google in data.
I just want to be able to use it anonymously. But then they changed their payment guidelines requiring PayPal to share my address with them. So adblocking it is 🤷🏼
been a happy premium subscriber for like 12 years now. I don't understand why ppl think a service that involves tons of server infrastructure to run should be free... just feels like immature entitlement
I think people have two problems with YouTube. 1 it is Google and therefore monumentally evil. 2 they started the service as free then enshittified it slowly. It's not like they just added a few ads then left it alone. They have relentlessly added more and more ads to the point it's disgusting. I think if it was always one way or the other, it would get far less hate. Me personally, I probably need about 30 minutes of YouTube per month. I'm damned sure not paying for that and due to said ads getting worse and worse, I'm using an ad blocker for sure.
I mean, you might be older than me but I doubt it :)
I remember when YouTube was cool, before Google bought it. But at this point that was a relatively short time period. I know they bought it to make money and that's not even necessarily the worst thing. My main issue with Google regarding YouTube is the slow enshittification of it. I remember when there was either no ad, or a 5-7 second single ad for a whole video. Those days are way gone though.
I switched over to NewPipe a couple weeks back after consciously tolerating ads on the official mobile apps for years. This is what pushed me over the edge:
I was watching a 30 minute video a friend had shared and a (skippable) 4 minute ad played probably a little before the 10 minute mark. It was a variant of an ad I had seen before, but I've been interested in the product, so I let the ad play all the way through. But now for the rest of the video, all the ads I was getting were several minutes long and all were unskippable. The interval of actual video content became shorter as well, so I was effectively watching more ads than the content I was trying to view. I decided to finish the video just to experience how ridiculous it was. Immediately installed NewPipe afterwards.
I have a hard time thinking it wasn't a coincidence that the ads became unskippable partway through the video after watching one ad all the way through. Obviously, I can't say that for sure. But I sure as hell am not tolerating that ratio of ads to content. I feel guilty for not sending ad view pennies to the creators I enjoy, but this YouTube "experiment" made the platform unusable for me.
Wow, that sounds pretty ridiculous. I rarely have seen it for years with ads but every time I have, it's been pretty disgusting. I have also had the feeling I was watching more ads than content, which is very far overboard.
They probably do that when one plays all the way through because people let shit continue to play without being there, and they can count that as an impression and get paid for it if they just inject a bunch of them to an active but unmonitored stream. The fact that you actually sat through it is completely irrelevant to them. Most people would have closed it out or went back in the video to whenever they left, which would likely reset the ad serving instruction.
Speculation, of course, but the sort of fuckery every big company is doing these days.
Also, creators don’t really get money from ads. Don’t feel bad for skipping them. Sponsorships and direct donations are basically the only ways creators make anything worth making on YouTube. Many creators will tell you as much themselves.
Right, all i ask is a cheap ad free service, and Google did just that with YouTube. I will continue to support that business model.
The ones that piss me off are amazon where i pay for the upgraded "ad free" version but there are still ads, and they want to me pay for each "channel". Amazon can suck my dick.
On desktop I get the "Video running slow? Disable your ad blocker" popup in a corner. But videos loaded normally.
On mobile everything was fine until recently. In the last couple of weeks, videos do have a small lag before loading. Still preferable to ads. And I'm just using the browser's in built blocker.
Weird, I've heard a lot of people go on about Apple. I didn't even bring up Android, I'm not much of a fanboy for stuff like that. You asked me if I know it was for Apple, and I said I don't know. Maybe look it up?
So because your algorithm is cooked you're mad at me for saying I don't know how to put a program on an apple phone, and yelled at me about Android even though I didn't even bring it up?
Like, seriously, why take it personally that I don't like a thing you like? I didn't say you were bad for liking apple. I didn't rage out about you asking.
I think it's referring to the "you can't block ads on YT or we might ban you" popups you get on YT occasionally, if you're using an adblocker. I have only had it happen once or twice before I did a quick online search and found an extra filter or two to add to uBlock Origin, and then I stopped seeing them.
I wonder how much time their devs spend working on a new ad block detector scheme that gets shown to a couple dozen people before ublock origin adds it to the default filters and none of their users see it again.
I wonder if they get frustrated or just laugh and get back to the endless job. Or if they also write some of the ublock filters themselves.
This is a cold war happening in the background of the internet. If the advertising industry wins, everybody loses. Advertisement is intrusive by design.
Thanks but what's different/better about it? Does it fix the issue with nested comments not nesting, and ads that are showing up in Shorts after the latest ReVanced update?
With the glorious return of Tom Scott, I finally signed up to Nebula yesterday, and am pleasantly surprised at how many of my YT regulars are already on there. £30 for a year, no ads, and an Apple TV app.
Which is £30 more than I paid YouTube, because the family plan is a ridiculous amount of money.
That's just not true... When you have YouTube premium, you pay the creators you watch proportionally to your watch time of their content out of your subscription. You are giving them more of your money the more you watch that specific channel.
And even the pittance is more than 3x your AdSense view. As far as I'm concerned, premium is paying creators i watch while providing me with a more than serviceable music app and an ad free experience on both.
If you pay $14 for YTP and watched literally only one channel, ever, that channel could get up to a max of $7, less transaction fees. Alphabet eats the other $7. If you use uBlock and SponsorBlock, you get the same ad-free experience and can then control how the $14 gets distributed. I technically spend more than the cost of YTP each month on the creators I support, but I can see my contribution going directly to the creators in nearly the full allocated amounts. That's a huge difference to small channels. Corporate lackeys will go 'but the server costs!' but Alphabet made ~$34B off of other people's creations last quarter alone and have consistently made the user experience worse since they acquired YT, so any complaints from Alphabet's C suite can be safely filed under BS.
I don't disagree with your point but your data is not correct...
Alphabet reported $34.46 billion in net income for Q4 2025 on total revenue of $113.8 billion.
Ads generated $82.3 billion (72% of revenue):
Google Search ($63 billion)
YouTube ($11.4 billion)
Network ($7.8 billion)
This is all REVENUE not Profit! Yes Alphabet made ~34B Profit that Quarter but not only from Youtube ad's. I would assume a 25-30% margin on Youtube Max, so it's more like ~4B Profit of Youtube Ad's (Yes still a fuck ton of money).
I never mentioned premium, because yes it works like that for premium. But even for that paying them directly is better, as it avoids youtube's cut completely.
Yeah, of all the subscription services I don't think YouTube is very egregious. The people you watch earn way more from you that way than watching ads.
I block all ads. Content creators earn more than I do by shilling for any company giving them 2 cents. They can fuck right off if they start crying about adblockers.
Brave Browser and Ublock Origin and I haven't seen an ad on YouTube in forever. I get some people have a bug up their arse about Brave for whatever reason, but I'm just sayin' ... no ads.
"Experiencing interruptions? Find out why" - Naah I'm fine dude, just take your time.
Oh no! The video is black for a few seconds instead of showing several ads for a minute! Whatever am I going to do???
Even if they keep the screen black for 30 second to a minute, I'd still gladly wait in silence than be subjected to advertisements.
If they ever make it impossible to watch videos without first watching ads, then I'll just leave the platform. I have no loyalty to YouTube and I'll sooner dump the platform and move on to other video sites than deal with enshittification and ads.
Yep. Then it will be time to finally start exploring peertube or something...
i wish peertube had more/better discovery tools
The problem isnt discovery its content. There isnt much good content on there. You'll find the good stuff pretty quickly.
I take that personally :(
Actually most of my videos are just boring things that I find interesting, and I get just as many views on there as I did on YouTube. And the autocaptions are waaaaaay better.
What I like about peertube is it's just people uploading for the love of it, not content farms and AI slop chasing a quick buck.
Edit: oh yeah and not having multiple ads on my videos.
But they offer an ad free plan that isn't expensive, and the service is really fast and reliable, and comes with YouTube music as well. Why pay for streaming sites that still give you ads like amazon or peacock, but won't pay for YouTube?
I don't pay for streaming sites. 🏴☠️ And I definitely won't give YouTube any money. I've always been able to browse their videos without paying a cent. I'm not about to start now.
Besides, I don't like how everything has become subscription services nowadays. You used to be able to pay once and own a product. Now you need to pay monthly to have temporary access to a constantly changing library. No thanks, I'll only spend money on things I can own forever.
"Actually I like getting cucked by YouTube" - you
I love ad free music on my car, and no ads on my phone and pc, i and support company's they allow my to get this service. You enjoy pricing every company is right to go to the ad models because people won't pay for the ad free versions.
I also love ad free music anywhere, its called downloading a fucking mp3 file and using an mp3 player.
Go to bed grandpa.
I just dont trust them not to use the payment and account info to track me more for every other ad they serve.
They get nothing.
Well i hope you didn't send this message from an android phone or Windows 11.
We truly live in a society, don’t we.
I don't? Anyone who pays for a service to show them ads is a rube?
I would actually consider paying for a service like Youtube if it truly was as simple as that, but it isn't. Even if they aren't showing ads after your buy premium, they are still collecting, training on, and selling your data and habits. This is payment. I don't believe in double-dipping; if I'm already paying in my data, then I'm not going to give you money or watch your ads.
If you want to show ads without harvesting data or offer a way to pay monetarily that stops ads and data harvesting, then I'll watch ads or buy. But I absolutely do no accept double-dipping. If I'm already paying, I'm not paying again.
So you watch ads and get your data collected? That's crazy.
No, I don't watch ads?
Crazy how they keep having to put words in others' mouths to have something to argue against.
I used to pay for YT.
I quit because they were very anti-creator and i did not support the changes they were making.
Not expensive? I just checked. It's 8€/m for me. Which means 96€/year.
Maybe that's not expensive for the USAians that earn hundreds of thousands per year. But it is expensive to just remove a few ads that can be easily blocked. It won't even stop the Google tracking, it just stops the ads on YouTube. An ad blocker will also block the tracking.
Fixed that for ya.
The way I see it, don't make your thing free for 20 years if you want people to pay for it. At this point, it's as natural and free as a summer's breeze in our minds.
It's still free though. The paid version is just an ad free version. YouTube had always had ads for the free version.
not OP but personally I watch maybe 2h of YT /month. Because I only watch one dude who posts about monthly, then the rest is just random links I'm clicking from a post or something. I donate to the guy periodically. The other links half of them are news clips or something that I could prob just get from their site.
The one-size model just doesn't fit my use case. I'd pay for a per-time-watched plan if it was reasonably priced but it doesn't even exist.
Honestly I could do without it entirely. Personally.
Oh that's why it says this? Guess I'll block this message too.
I'm watching a 4h video. I can wait 5 seconds for it to load 😂
I’m fine with waiting 10 seconds at the beginning of a video. I wonder how much YouTube would save (by reducing bandwidth, smaller caches, choosing slower storage) if they didn’t have the goal to start the video virtually immediately.
That feature isn't built into YT? I have it set on my browser to where the video needs to be manually started (excluding playlists).
My point was: You don’t need to wait for it to buffer or even load. Once the page is there, the video is playable.
I don't know why this just happens on my laptop. Probably it's because it has a slower CPU. Also, this website shouldn't be this bloated
Bloat + they default to that message after a timer + they intentionally throttle users using adblock
Just using Firefox triggers the throttle too.
You can tell they're deliberately causing the delay by the way it pops up instantly and sends you to a page about turning off adblockers. The experiencing interruptions message used to send you to a page about ISP network performance...
Very well knowing why and watching them do their stalling is indeed fine.
Every time you are reminded how petty they are.
The best part is that Youtube ad revenue is low enough that everyone who can is doing their own sponsor segments, so paying for Youtube to remove their ads doesn't remove a lot of the ads. The only way to an ad-free experience is adblock+sponsorblock.
I was happy to pay for YT Premium when there was a loophole so you could sign up from a far cheaper country. I paid about £6 a month for the family plan, purely so I could watch on Apple TV without having to tolerate adverts.
Then they closed the loophole, shitcanned our premium, and demanded £20 for the same experience. We had Netflix at the time, which was cheaper. So I made a little app as a frontend for yt-dlp, and downloaded what I wanted to watch into my Jellyfin server.
Fuck Google.
I'll never understand why people are proud to waste their life watching ads. Or are proud to use adblock and steal the content being posted by small creators. You're really sticking it to the little guy, great job.
If the little guy is staking their livelihood on revenue from getting in bed with the devil, they deserve nothing.
Ok, so you can never use any google product ever again! If you ever again in your life watch a Youtube Video remember what kind of Hypocrite you are! This also goes for TikTok, Instagramm, etc. (Any plattform that has User generated Content & uses Ad's)
Try thinking harder than... whatever this is.
The people saying "just pay for premium" don't seem to understand that in the beginning YouTube was free and had no ads. When google purchased it they promised to keep it that way. Then they slowly started with ads. At first they were pretty unobtrusive banners, then a short skippable preroll then multiple preroll then unskippable preroll. The reason I refuse to pay for premium is because Google created this issue and is now selling the solution. I refuse to be a part of that. It has nothing to do with the creators.
ReVanced and Grayjay do the same thing but for free and are open source so long as Google keeps trying to engineer enshitification the proud people of the open source community will engineer a solution.
The new Revanced is Morphe. 👍
Hmm weird take. Yes these are solutions to the Ad's problem from the user side but they are just UI Wrapper for Youtube so they don't have any costs for hosting & providing all the content. So yea they don't need to monetize. This doesn't however fix the problem for Youtube itself. How are they supposed to pay for cost & make a profit?
I totally agree that Youtube with all the Ad's is unusable (I'm using an AdBlocker) but Youtube is still a Profit orientated company so how do we fix this dilemma. Youtube Premium feels not worth it to most people because Youtube was always "free" so paying for it now makes people go like "WTF?". So Ad's & enshitification was/is the only way to make a profit for Youtube. I don't like it either but this is reality.
If you have a solution for them I'm sure they would pay you handsomely for it.
Peertube is a solution, it is an open source peet to peer video hosting platform. But in truth having good competition is a way to force better practices, and if open source is the best option people will go for it if they know about it. linux, thanks to valve and Microslop's poor idea of what people want (and governments leery of Microsoft and Trump's close association decoding to have their own OS for internal use at least), have gotten a small influx of users as a whole, but with more users the more open source solutions to compatibility will be produced, and hopefully if you are looking for the YouTube equivalent you'll try peertube.
The cost of hosting YouTube itself doesn't pay for itself unfortunately. They could get away with it back then because the internet itself wasn't that big. Therefore, we need to KICK THE NORMIES OUT OF OUR INTERNET. WE WERE HERE FIRST, REEEEEE
Google reported an annual gross profit of $240.3 billion last year.
They can fucking pay for YouTube
It's even worse, their net was $132 billion
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/net-income
So even after expenses, the profit of alphabet group was obscene.
It's even worse, they laid off approximately 12,000 employees in 2024 alone.
So even after everything, the profit of alphabet group was obscene.
I would totally pay for youtube if it was even remotely decently priced.
You can get multiple concurrents on disney+, Hulu or Netflix with blockbuster content for the same price as youtube's slop filled premium family.
Seriously, the service is worth maybe $9 a month. I don't want their music, i won't use it, the quality is crap.
I mean, as it grew the hosting/staffing costs went up as well. There's no way it could have continued to be completely free.
That's still a bait and switch though.
No, it isn't.
Yes, it is. Start by offering unsustainable ad-free video. Drive competitors out and monopolize the market. Start turning the screws. Classic tech bro bait and switch.
That's really not what happened. YouTube wasn't created to drive out competitors and monopolize the market.
It may have ended up doing that, but a bait and switch is an intentional action.
But you yourself literally just argued the impossibility of it running ad free indefinitely. If you attract customers by knowingly offering a level of service at a cost you know with absolute certainty that you can't maintain, then yes, it's a bait and switch. It's deception and manipulation. Classic bait and switch. Youtube isn't special. They're just Walmart.
And you're just wrong. There's no other reason to offer a service temporarily for free than to use it to drive out competitors. That strategy only has any value as a means of driving out competition.
But, sure, keep simping for the evil megacorp.
Ftfy.
I don’t think this is as simple as “they’re too young to know”! I’m a 30+ year old man, and I was around 15 when YouTube first came out. I was a huge fan of the early days, when YouTube was free!
I am absolutely fine with paying a monthly/annual fee for ad-free access to perhaps the best compilation of human knowledge and entertainment which has ever been compiled in one place. One reason I’m cool with it is that premium views pay the content creator more than the equivalent ad view.
Sure, YouTube “created the issue” of ads. But if it means supporting the creators and removing a barrier to videos, I’m fine with the price.
I would pay if it was a quality service and not ran by clowns
Also not run by oligarchs
All oligarchs are clowns, but all clowns are not oligarchs
And they didn’t do their damndest to destroy competitors
How is YouTube not a quality service lmao
well the Apple TV app is shit and the platform is overrun with AI slop
People who only watch two or three 20-minute videos from the top of their recommendations on their home tab may have no idea the platform is as sloppy as scrollers know it to be.
Try saying suicide or rape, or making a channel where all of your videos are under 10 minutes and trying to get paid for it.
My favourite unexpected bonus from switching to Linux has been a completely ad free youtube experience. Not entirely sure why this magic is happening but I love it.
On windows Firefox + ublock origin is an ad free experience for YouTube. Any chance you picked a browser that has ublock origin added hy default?
Hmmm, I could've sworn my Firefox had ublock origin on windows but I might've screwed something up etc.
I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth though!
This shouldn’t happen unless you also switched to a niche browser.
I used Firefox on windows with as much anti as stuff as I could find but they still snuck through.
I'm okay considering it a Linux miracle.
Hallelujah!
Firefox for android allows extensions 🎉
Slapped ublock immediately. Never seen ads ever since.
Hey people
Newpipe
Pipepipe
If one ever breaks the other can usually still download or stream with no ads or fuckery
Grayjay
Easily the best video streaming app. Uses sponsorblock on youtube as well. Lets you consolidate all your video feeds in one place. I wouldn't bother using Nebula without this.
I'll give that a shot too. The more tools I have to get around YouTube's API fuckery the better
Great; where’s the iOS app?
Great; where’s the iOS app?
Lol
They're eventually gonna start banning accounts for this and then requiring login to view YouTube.
I doubt they’ll ever actually do it, just threaten it constantly.
They’d rather have people without accounts, and/or using adblockers keep using the site. If they started actually cracking down, then it would create a significant pool of users who would use some other platform. They’d rather eat the losses of some people not viewing ads then push a significant amount of users to a potential competitor.
Much like how Microsoft hasn’t cracked down on unlicensed windows installs because it would push a significant amount of people to look for an alternative OS.
well, I don't think people would actually move platforms if that happened. reddit did some stuff that everyone hated and it's still absolutely massive while the alternative, Lemmy, is small af. that's not even considering the difficulty of making an alternative to YouTube.
The difference is that Reddit was still largely usable after the API changes and most affected users weren’t getting banned. Some people have a high tolerance for ads, but a lot of people would find YouTube unusable without an ad blocker, and if YouTube was banning people, they’d be destroying a lot of the inertia against going somewhere else.
If we say that something like 20% of users on YouTube are using adblockers, that’s a big enough addressable market for a competitor to seriously take off. Enough to attract content creators and VC funding to get it off the ground. In the end YouTube would probably win, but it would be after a few years of actually having to compete. The revenue loss over that time period isn’t worth the short term gain of getting some small percentage of users to watch ads.
If YouTube felt like it could get away with banning people using ad blockers and requiring an account to watch, they would have done it a decade ago.
Do they think they are essential and believe I will not simply forget they ever existed?
May very well be, but that will be in line with their out of touch and deluded policies.
I do not agree with their changes & policies but I think you underestimate the market share Youtube has in this area. Also you are not the average Youtube user (being on Lemmy and all) so you should think about how the average user interacts with the platform (they don't care about Ad's & don't know how to install an Ad Blocker). I think Youtube can do a lot more shit before normal people would start to jump ship, but even then what are the alternatives for them? Peertube etc. don't have the content they watch...
Sure they have a huge market share. That's simply from being the first video-sharing platform and being from Google.
There is nothing unique or irreplaceable about them and plenty alternatives do exactly the same thing now.
Only better without ads.
Problem is there are too many and divide the small leftover market share between them.
When/if that's fixed people will not look back.
'normal' people choose VLC now and other FOSS.
YT is not their favorite sportsteam, they have no loyalty to them.
On the contrary. If someone insists on playing YT music for friends and it's interrupted by an ad, everyone's annoyed.
And content is shared on as many platforms as they can since it's free and they want as much viewers as possible.
They got me on chrome with this. I fought with it for about an hour but if I was logged in, videos just would not load.
So back to Firefox I go wheeeee
Dafuq is a scarescreen?
you know those FBI Warnings in front of a LEGALLY (they are removed by pirates on pirated movies) procured Movie? Those are scare screens.
Those are still a thing? I associate them with VHS lol
It's like a jumpscare, but a screen instead.
You seem to have dropped this.
(＾-＾)＿日
Did they? I don't understand
They added display name restrictions at some point and now I can't change my settings without picking a real one 😕
Unlock origin always always always free
hmmm? Sorry I was busy enjoying my favorite creators on invidious with sponsorskip. Not sure what you all guys are talking about. Youtube is so good when you remove Youtube from the equation.
You do you. I like my YT Premium. Many of the creators I watch there simply don't publish anywhere else, and I don't have time for ads, especially if I'm watching on my smart TV.
This used to be the case, but it's a different equation now. Ads used to be one or two per video. Fine, I get there are bills to pay.
Now it's pure greed and pushing us to a subscription for a service they purposely made shitty so we would think exactly what you are. 4-5 ads, with forced ads interrupting the videos, and auto redirects to more ads after the video fonishes. Unskippable multi-minute ads.
And if you're thinking "well then just pay for it", tell that to Netflix, Hulu, and all of the streaming services that were "ad-free" until they decided that actually, pay twice as much or watch ads (even though your paying).
So while I understand you're saying, you're assuming Google will play fair. They won't. They will up the price, they will still force ads, and it will get worse. I'm taking a stand now saying enough is enough. I'm not rewarding them for enshittifying the service.
Check out Nebula, it is paid but there are no ads and they have a decent amount of YouTubers and are adding more regularly.
Also your feed is based on subscriptions not an algorithm.
Oh don't worry, I'm there, I'll happily give money to them
This is the future - independent creator channels and collectives. In truth we consumers might end up paying slightly more, but vastly more of what's collected will go into the hands of the actual creators and creatives than to a bunch of suits who do nothing.
I am also a Nebula subscriber and preferentially view creators there if the content is also on YT. I purchased a lifetime subscription to Nebula; I hope I get my money's worth.
My YT subscription page (https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions) is also just what I've subscribed to, in reverse-chronological order. Unfortunately, that's not all the YT I consume, plenty of after-video recommendations, and sometimes I intentionally visit the main page, which is all algorithm. I do need to work on that -- near-ending algorithmic recommendations are probably not the best thing to spend my limited life time on.
Hey if YT works for you, then use it.
No one is assuming anything. I cancelled my netflix when they started that shit and stopped watching prime. These are services you can turn off when the terms dont align with your approval. If/When google tries the same shit ill cancel that too.
I decided to keep Netflix (and just pay for the ad-free tier), but dropped prime because there was some content that was not available ad-free, and UBO (et. al.) was unable to strip them.
So you refuse to pay because they MIGHT do something bad? That's a pretty weak argument. You're taking a stand against... What? You were never a paying customer in the first place, and they have not enshitified YouTube Premium in the over 10 years I've had it. In fact, I still pay a grandfathered $8/mo for my account - which is grace I was never given by Hulu or Netflix as they repeatedly jacked up the price over that same timespan. Seems to me they've earned the benefit of the doubt.
They actually did. They called it Google Play Music, and Google TV/Google Play Videos. I paid for those. Youtube Music and Youtube premium are the enshittified versions of those, and they will continue to make them worse.
I will concede that the YouTube Music app started (and might still be) worse than GPM was in the end. But I'm not sure it could be considered enshittification. Yeah, the YTM app itself was kinda shit, especially at first - but they didn't make the service materially worse and charge more for features they took away. They didn't jack up the price to coincide with the "new" service, they just consolidated the two separate services into one. They didn't introduce ads. They didn't silently take down a ton of the music offered and leave the price the same - they still have the same 100M tracks as the other guys, and you ONLY get music from those other services.
I agree and get where you're coming from on this example - but I think people use the term enshittification more broadly than it's actual definition, and in my opinion this doesn't fit.
Hahahaha class war
I actually find the value to be worth YouTube premium. YouTube music works crazy good on my cars wifi and infotainment, and i get 4 users that i can add to my family plan so now me and my wife and kids gets all ad free on any device. And i watch now YouTube that i do Netflix, and netflix cost almost the same for only 1 login.
Personally i support any company that provides me an option for AD free service. I can't stand companies that charge me, and show ads.
I don't double-pay. Until Google comes out saying that Premium halts not just ads but also data harvesting, I'm not interested. I'm already paying Google in data.
I just want to be able to use it anonymously. But then they changed their payment guidelines requiring PayPal to share my address with them. So adblocking it is 🤷🏼
seconded
been a happy premium subscriber for like 12 years now. I don't understand why ppl think a service that involves tons of server infrastructure to run should be free... just feels like immature entitlement
I think people have two problems with YouTube. 1 it is Google and therefore monumentally evil. 2 they started the service as free then enshittified it slowly. It's not like they just added a few ads then left it alone. They have relentlessly added more and more ads to the point it's disgusting. I think if it was always one way or the other, it would get far less hate. Me personally, I probably need about 30 minutes of YouTube per month. I'm damned sure not paying for that and due to said ads getting worse and worse, I'm using an ad blocker for sure.
Monopolist pricing is made up numbers to extract rent from the public.
If there was competition the price might be fair. Instead you pay whatever the Google exec thinks you will tolerate.
Yep true
They didn't start the service, they bought it with the long term plan of making it profitable.
I mean, you might be older than me but I doubt it :)
I remember when YouTube was cool, before Google bought it. But at this point that was a relatively short time period. I know they bought it to make money and that's not even necessarily the worst thing. My main issue with Google regarding YouTube is the slow enshittification of it. I remember when there was either no ad, or a 5-7 second single ad for a whole video. Those days are way gone though.
I switched over to NewPipe a couple weeks back after consciously tolerating ads on the official mobile apps for years. This is what pushed me over the edge:
I was watching a 30 minute video a friend had shared and a (skippable) 4 minute ad played probably a little before the 10 minute mark. It was a variant of an ad I had seen before, but I've been interested in the product, so I let the ad play all the way through. But now for the rest of the video, all the ads I was getting were several minutes long and all were unskippable. The interval of actual video content became shorter as well, so I was effectively watching more ads than the content I was trying to view. I decided to finish the video just to experience how ridiculous it was. Immediately installed NewPipe afterwards.
I have a hard time thinking it wasn't a coincidence that the ads became unskippable partway through the video after watching one ad all the way through. Obviously, I can't say that for sure. But I sure as hell am not tolerating that ratio of ads to content. I feel guilty for not sending ad view pennies to the creators I enjoy, but this YouTube "experiment" made the platform unusable for me.
Wow, that sounds pretty ridiculous. I rarely have seen it for years with ads but every time I have, it's been pretty disgusting. I have also had the feeling I was watching more ads than content, which is very far overboard.
They probably do that when one plays all the way through because people let shit continue to play without being there, and they can count that as an impression and get paid for it if they just inject a bunch of them to an active but unmonitored stream. The fact that you actually sat through it is completely irrelevant to them. Most people would have closed it out or went back in the video to whenever they left, which would likely reset the ad serving instruction.
Speculation, of course, but the sort of fuckery every big company is doing these days.
Also, creators don’t really get money from ads. Don’t feel bad for skipping them. Sponsorships and direct donations are basically the only ways creators make anything worth making on YouTube. Many creators will tell you as much themselves.
Dude had paid for YouTube for 12 years he’s never seen a single ad
I agree that YouTube without premium is unusable.
Better option:
adblock+sponsorblock+donate your subscription fee for a good cause instead
I’ve never paid for YouTube and don’t see ads either.
Right, all i ask is a cheap ad free service, and Google did just that with YouTube. I will continue to support that business model.
The ones that piss me off are amazon where i pay for the upgraded "ad free" version but there are still ads, and they want to me pay for each "channel". Amazon can suck my dick.
Same. I’ve stopped Spotify now and just use YouTube music. Worth it for that alone I’d say
Nicotine+ and downloading all the music I want in high quality also works great.
They show screens about that ? I haven't seen any !
On desktop I get the "Video running slow? Disable your ad blocker" popup in a corner. But videos loaded normally.
On mobile everything was fine until recently. In the last couple of weeks, videos do have a small lag before loading. Still preferable to ads. And I'm just using the browser's in built blocker.
I would not be surprised if Google deliberately introduces slowdowns to some ad blocker users.
Yeah and they are pretty bad in terms of wording. It’s like „Try premium now for free“: „Yes“ or „Next time“
Do ye folks not have newpipe?
i do, and i get a pop up every time i use it now, warning that their services will likely end this fall
My friend told me that you just wouldn't be able to download it again in the fall or something, but it'll still work
How do I get that on iOS?
By leaving your walled garden.
No thanks. Seems more like android is coming into the garden.
Well then you have to wait for the gardeners to tell you what you're allowed to do, stop asking questions.
Why?
if you use apple products then, that's skill issue for a few months more.
I might use apple products but I now how to spell and use punctuation.
sorry, English is not my first language.
Hell if I know, I avoid apple like the plague.
And I avoid android like the plague; what’s your point?
I hate when people just say “android android android”.
Weird, I've heard a lot of people go on about Apple. I didn't even bring up Android, I'm not much of a fanboy for stuff like that. You asked me if I know it was for Apple, and I said I don't know. Maybe look it up?
Weird, I've heard a lot of people go on about Android (when it comes to YouTube and ads).
So because your algorithm is cooked you're mad at me for saying I don't know how to put a program on an apple phone, and yelled at me about Android even though I didn't even bring it up?
Like, seriously, why take it personally that I don't like a thing you like? I didn't say you were bad for liking apple. I didn't rage out about you asking.
Bye.
What are scare screens in this context?
I think it's referring to the "you can't block ads on YT or we might ban you" popups you get on YT occasionally, if you're using an adblocker. I have only had it happen once or twice before I did a quick online search and found an extra filter or two to add to uBlock Origin, and then I stopped seeing them.
I wonder how much time their devs spend working on a new ad block detector scheme that gets shown to a couple dozen people before ublock origin adds it to the default filters and none of their users see it again.
I wonder if they get frustrated or just laugh and get back to the endless job. Or if they also write some of the ublock filters themselves.
This is a cold war happening in the background of the internet. If the advertising industry wins, everybody loses. Advertisement is intrusive by design.
What is a scare screen?
No idea because I use Ublock Origin/YouTube ReVanced/SmartTubeNext
Some guys from Revanced left to create Morphe.
Love it!
Thanks but what's different/better about it? Does it fix the issue with nested comments not nesting, and ads that are showing up in Shorts after the latest ReVanced update?
Something like: “You’re using an adblocker and we don’t like it. You can’t view any videos.”
They usually go away after updating your Adblocker.
With the glorious return of Tom Scott, I finally signed up to Nebula yesterday, and am pleasantly surprised at how many of my YT regulars are already on there. £30 for a year, no ads, and an Apple TV app.
Which is £30 more than I paid YouTube, because the family plan is a ridiculous amount of money.
is his shirt a label, a seasoning, or a command?
Yes
Yes.....yes.
So is the scare screen when the UI flicker's and I get a pop up saying "why you experiencing interruptions"?. I use brave browser
I found that logging out solves it
If you don't visit YouTube...
ahem VPN Albania. Sorted.
Doesn't always work. I've gotten German ads on my phone in YT. But it does feel like you get fewer ads.
That's worrying - I use split tunnelling on the express VPN and haven't seen an add in months.
I pay for it, and get YouTube Music with it. I think it's worth it, and in the country I'm currently living, it's inexpensive (~US$5 a month) 🤷🏻♂️
Love how you get downvoted for your own personal preference. This place is wild.
Dissenting opinions aren't allowed here, obvs
Have all the opinions you want just fucking voice them and don’t downvote shit just because it’s not your preference. Or do I’m not your mum.
Just like Reddit 🤮
A big chunk of ad revenue goes to content creators, so you at least support them.
While this is technically true, this only works because of the scale. Each individual user contributes less than pennies.
If you really want to support a creator, donate 5 dollars to them every year and you will be more valuable than any ad viewer.
That's just not true... When you have YouTube premium, you pay the creators you watch proportionally to your watch time of their content out of your subscription. You are giving them more of your money the more you watch that specific channel.
A cap of 50% of your youtube premium goes to the creators.
Small creators are given a pittance, large creators get the lions share, even with equal watch hours.
And even the pittance is more than 3x your AdSense view. As far as I'm concerned, premium is paying creators i watch while providing me with a more than serviceable music app and an ad free experience on both.
If you pay $14 for YTP and watched literally only one channel, ever, that channel could get up to a max of $7, less transaction fees. Alphabet eats the other $7. If you use uBlock and SponsorBlock, you get the same ad-free experience and can then control how the $14 gets distributed. I technically spend more than the cost of YTP each month on the creators I support, but I can see my contribution going directly to the creators in nearly the full allocated amounts. That's a huge difference to small channels. Corporate lackeys will go 'but the server costs!' but Alphabet made ~$34B off of other people's creations last quarter alone and have consistently made the user experience worse since they acquired YT, so any complaints from Alphabet's C suite can be safely filed under BS.
I don't disagree with your point but your data is not correct... Alphabet reported $34.46 billion in net income for Q4 2025 on total revenue of $113.8 billion. Ads generated $82.3 billion (72% of revenue):
This is all REVENUE not Profit! Yes Alphabet made ~34B Profit that Quarter but not only from Youtube ad's. I would assume a 25-30% margin on Youtube Max, so it's more like ~4B Profit of Youtube Ad's (Yes still a fuck ton of money).
I never mentioned premium, because yes it works like that for premium. But even for that paying them directly is better, as it avoids youtube's cut completely.
Yeah, of all the subscription services I don't think YouTube is very egregious. The people you watch earn way more from you that way than watching ads.
I block all ads. Content creators earn more than I do by shilling for any company giving them 2 cents. They can fuck right off if they start crying about adblockers.
Brave Browser and Ublock Origin and I haven't seen an ad on YouTube in forever. I get some people have a bug up their arse about Brave for whatever reason, but I'm just sayin' ... no ads.
Fuck brave. The CEO is anti LGBT+, plus a bunch of other shady things.
Ublock Origin is enough, no matter which browser you use, to never see any ads.
Firefox. Ublock is pn tge mobile version and tge desktop version.
on mobile i highly recommend ironfox if you have the patience and knowlege to set up f-droid
I love FF and wish they could find themselves again.
Since other, more ethical browsers also have "no ads", the bug will remain.