Corporations in general. Reddit with their API prices, Adobe with their montly subscription for rotating pages in the Adobe Reader, Netflix with their lockdown on account sharing... Capitalism yay!
VueTube (still under development, the team is working slow because it's pretty small, they have a few time to spend on it and they need devs, it's a complete FOSS alternative to Vanced, and will have most of its features including optional Google log in with interactions)
If you need to login and have a full YouTube experience:
Revancedapp
Newpipe is perfect for me, been using it for months, now when I want to watch a video, I don't wind up watching whatever, I have a more purposeful experience.
Yes, Newpipe works great, I use both because I want to interact with my favorite creators and share my history and lists with the PC so I'm forced to log in, so the best option for that is a patched YouTube app like revanced (I used to use vanced until a few months ago when they definitely killed it).
I'd be surprised if Google completely stamped it out. They're on Codeberg now, so that'll make takedowns trickier. It's also distributed, so taking down the Invidious websites is virtually impossible.
Also, while Google probably has pretty good lawyers, I'm not sure how well they'll stand up if they go to court.
The one thing the Reddit exodus has taught me, is that I'm almost eager for a reason to ditch my social media and either find something new or simply take back that time and do something more fulfilling anyway.
I'm so much happier not being constantly blasted with advertisements, that now when I have to go back on insta or FB for whatever reason, I can't stand more than 30 seconds before I nope back off.
Looking forward to axing YouTube from my life next.
I left FB and Instagram about 3 years ago. At first I felt sad because I was "disconnected" from my large network of hundreds of people I know or have met. The truth was the majority of these "friends" weren't actually participating in my life at all. Those networks for most part were just allowing for some sort of passive consumption of our lives and when I had finally left, it was great. The hour or so I would spend trying to "keep up" with everyone was given back to me and it was refreshing to catch up with friends because we actually get to catch up.
Recently though, I spun up an instance of a private social network just for my family using a web app called HumHub. There's about 20 members and we use it just for our small family. No outsiders, no ads, no spam, just us. It takes me back to a time where social media was simple.
I just watched Wendover's video on how they built Nebula. Most of the content I watch is on that platform, so I'd be happy to just ditch YouTube if they move forward with this.
I just watched Wendover's video on how they built Nebula. Most of the content I watch is on that platform, so I'd be happy to just ditch YouTube if they move forward with this.
What if… We all got YouTube Premium, is Google then earning more or breakeven, when they cannot sell or display ads?
I mean, there are companies paying Google to display there ads, that revenue would be gone.
Companies are going out of their way to ignore the fact that "the easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates." - Gabe Newell
I consider adblocking to be in the same boat. Piracy/Adblocking only exists because it's not a pricing issue. It's a service issue. By making the free version even more intrusive ON PURPOSE, they're not pushing as many people to buy a subscription as they are pushing people to install adblockers. If YouTube only ever showed a quick 10-15 sec ad at the very beginning of a video, I'd be less inclined to go out of my way to find and install an adblocker (and maybe even eventually just buy a subscription) than if they force feed me back to back, 30-second, unskippable ads.
It's the same with those stupid fucking commercials that run ALL the time and try and be as annoying as possible. If I find your ad to be annoying and frequent and shoved down my throat all the time, I will vehemently and actively go out of my way to AVOID that product, not be more inclined to buy it.
Here it is in text format so ya'll don't have to type it out. I haven't verified that it works but by the looks of it it just makes the Adblock sensor report a false negative.
[edit, fixed some spacings that sneaked it's way into the filter upon copying it earlier.]
At some point the ratio of convenience to quality got all out of whack. Most people I know use maybe three different platforms at most and get angered by all of them. My internet experience peaked when I was checking 20 extremely specific forums regularly and using in-game chat 90% of the time (vent/teamspeak were reserved for raid night).
If a company has no competition, being a monopoly, it's basically free to do whatever it wants. Youtube controls the video streaming market of the internet. If they choose to not pay content creators, to run 10 ads in a row every 3 minutes, or to ban content creators for saying something their automods think is a bad word, what will you do? Where else will you turn? Odds are there's nothing for you on Vimeo. So you either make do with how Youtube operates, or you don't get to watch cat videos, or video essays on WW2, or playthroughs of Super Mario Sunshine, or what have you.
Bring able to skip 5 seconds into a 14-30 second ad isn't a huge inconvenience. When doing something AFK the ad ends in a reasonable amount of time so you're right back to your background music or whatever. I've never taken issue with that. I'm not a huge fan of the newer strategy that run two ads in a row, but it's still tolerable. What I deplore is the occasional infomercial ad that'll run for anywhere from 5 minutes to 20 hours without intervention. Those are the reason I run an ad blocker on the desktop.
On mobile there's fewer options. Running adblock on Firefox works for now, but if that gets neutered I won't cry. Another option is to install an app that works with the YouTube app to automatically skip ads after five seconds. If youtube takes action against those apps I'll spend a lot less time on YouTube.
This harkens to the current reddit situation. I'm only here because I got tired of their incessant "get our app" prompts on mobile and just started looking into getting an app right when the shit hit the fan. Forcing intrusive advertising on users is a great way to alienate them.
maybe you missed the part where they are not only trying to get rid of adblockers, but also are trying to change over to at least 30 seconds of unskippable ads
It's definitely not ideal, but since YT has become my primary video media content, and it's also my music streaming services. The cost has value for my family.
I am technical enough to get things like revanced installed, or others. Even for our set top boxes.
The amount of energy truly prevent tracking is endless. For me premium does pay the content creators more for my views and I don't see/hear any platform ads.
It's not ideal, but every other streaming service you sign into is profiling you too.
Inside my house/Network I do run pihole, and I use brave browser and it's shield, as well as unlock origin.
Ideal? No, I'd rather everything be free but that's not reality
I am 43 and I remember growing up, people in the early days of the internet were calling people in my age group (late genx/early millenial) a generation that will be "impossible to advertise to." For me, it's rang very true. I can't think of a single time I ever saw an ad for anything and it made me want to spend money on a product or service. But I guess that hasn't been the norm, or ads would be dead.
There are apps like NewPipe that pretend to be a regular browser but show the user an optimized video interface. And no ads of course.
They're in a constant arms race with YouTube to figure out where the actual video and the other stuff (comments, video info, related videos etc.) are on the page, and YouTube keeps moving them around on purpose too.
The other reply encompassed it really well, but essentially scraping is very very difficult to stop while also keeping YouTube videos publicly accessible (If the video and audio are playing on your computer, there isn't really a foolproof way to stop that from being captured). Whereas using the YouTube API to get videos can be easily stopped by Google.
YouTube is seriously forgetting it's role. I liked it better when it was dbz videos to Linkin Park and looney tunes. We use YouTube to not have a premium service then maybe contribute to the creators we like. We do NOT need yet another "streaming service" bill. They're getting out of hand.
YouTube: Show them this ad.
Browser: Sure. OK they watched it.
YouTube: Really? That was too fast. It was a three minute ad!
Browser: Oh, right. Well they’ve definitely watched it now.
YouTube: You sure?
Browser: Totally.
Something that youtube can do is open the ad on a background tab, muted and with width and lenght as minimum as possible. People don't want to see that shit, but want the ad revenue, so I guess it's a win/win situation?
I am constantly on YouTube. I have a stable of creators I follow and watching them has replaced the time I would have spent on other streaming services. It’s how I chill.
So I signed up for YouTube Premium and watch it on my TV with no ads. I have no complaints. I get full HD videos, streamers get paid, YouTube gets paid, and everyone is happy.
If one of your reasons for using YouTube premium is "streamers get paid", you should probably look into things a bit further.
The vast majority of YouTube premium revenue goes towards music publishers who, statistically, don't have any relation to the content you watch, and contribute nothing towards it.
The content you watch likely still has embedded advertising because YouTube has some of the worst, if not the worst, rates paid to people who actually create the videos on their platform (this means there's no such thing as "ad free YouTube" without using an ad blocker, even if you pay for premium)
I also use YouTube music instead of Spotify or Apple so I am fine with music rights holders getting paid. I haven’t seen any ads on my premium and I have had it for years and use it on my laptop, tvs, and tablets. The only ads I see are the sponsored segments in videos that not even an ad blocker can block because it’s part of the video done by the creator themselves.
check out a Firefox extension called SponsorBlock. It's updated by users but is pretty current and can be set to skip past self promotion and in video advertising.
Sponsor block is pretty good for those. But yeah I'm also a YouTube premium member for similar reasons, also had a Google music sub back in the day that converted over.
Sort of agreed, not really relevant to the parent comment though.
3+4. You can't have both "no ads allowed in-video" and "creators are paid a majority share of the money we make serving the video". YouTube was (and still is if I understand it correctly) barely profitable, and if it is profitable right now I'm sure it is because of the worst kind of data-mining.
It is way harder to provide an effective platform for content than it is to deliver actual content, especially as effort/content has close to zero effect on vitality/attention/profitability, while the aspects we want in a platform (especially in regards to privacy) are entirely unprofitable. As someone who uses adblock and generally dislikes the corporate aspect of YouTube I at least has to acknowledge that YouTube has to make money somehow, and that in-video sponsors seems like a win-win for everyone involved, especially when you can skip them pretty much effortlessly.
Normally I wouldn't even comment this shit, but as we are (hopefully) part of a shift to actual community driven platforms (fediverse in general), I think we have to aggressively discuss how to monetize these platforms enough so that they don't actively drain the wallets of the people maintaining them, and this is a very relevant aspect of that discussion.
Sort of agreed, not really relevant to the parent comment though.
3+4. You can't have both "no ads allowed in-video" and "creators are paid a majority share of the money we make serving the video". YouTube was (and still is if I understand it correctly) barely profitable, and if it is profitable right now I'm sure it is because of the worst kind of data-mining.
It is way harder to provide an effective platform for content than it is to deliver actual content, especially as effort/content has close to zero effect on vitality/attention/profitability, while the aspects we want in a platform (especially in regards to privacy) are entirely unprofitable. As someone who uses adblock and generally dislikes the corporate aspect of YouTube I at least has to acknowledge that YouTube has to make money somehow, and that in-video sponsors seems like a win-win for everyone involved, especially when you can skip them pretty much effortlessly.
Normally I wouldn't even comment this shit, but as we are (hopefully) part of a shift to actual community driven platforms (fediverse in general), I think we have to aggressively discuss how to monetize these platforms enough that they don't actively drain the wallets of the people maintaining them, and this is a very relevant aspect of that discussion.
Sort of agreed, not really relevant to the parent comment though.
3+4. You can't have both "no ads allowed in-video" and "creators are paid a majority share of the money we make serving the video". YouTube was (and still is if I understand it correctly) barely profitable, and if it is profitable right now I'm sure it is because of the worst kind of data-mining.
It is way harder to provide an effective platform for content than it is to deliver actual content, especially as effort/content has close to zero effect on vitality/attention/profitability, while the aspects we want in a platform (especially in regards to privacy) are entirely unprofitable. As someone who uses adblock and generally dislikes the corporate aspect of YouTube I at least has to acknowledge that YouTube has to make money somehow, and that in-video sponsors seems like a win-win for everyone involved, especially when you can skip them pretty much effortlessly.
Normally I wouldn't even comment this shit, but as we are (hopefully) part of a shift to actual community driven platforms (fediverse in general), I think we have to aggressively discuss how to monetize these platforms enough that they don't actively drain the wallets of the people maintaining them, and this is a very relevant aspect of that discussion.
Sort of agreed, not really relevant to the parent comment though.
3+4. You can't have both "no ads allowed in-video" and "creators are paid a majority share of the money we make serving the video". YouTube was (and still is if I understand it correctly) barely profitable, and if it is profitable right now I'm sure it is because of the worst kind of data-mining.
It is way harder to provide an effective platform for content than it is to deliver actual content, especially as effort/content has close to zero effect on vitality/attention/profitability, while the aspects we want in a platform (especially in regards to privacy) are entirely unprofitable. As someone who uses adblock and generally dislikes the corporate aspect of YouTube I at least has to acknowledge that YouTube has to make money somehow, and that in-video sponsors seems like a win-win for everyone involved, especially when you can skip them pretty much effortlessly.
Normally I wouldn't even comment this shit, but as we are (hopefully) part of a shift to actual community driven platforms (fediverse in general), I think we have to aggressively discuss how to monetize these platforms enough that they don't actively drain the wallets of the people maintaining them, and this is a very relevant aspect of that discussion.
I've blocked their ads for years. I support content creators by buying merchandise and with Patreon.
After hearing about this, I've decided to give YouTube Premium a try. It seems like an easier and more consistent way for me to support creators. I watch YT almost daily, and get a lot of value from it. I hate ads and refuse to watch them, but Premium users don't see them.
I wouldn't blame anyone for walking away from YouTube over this. But for me at least, this was kind of a no-brainer.
I know Google tracks users and targets us with ads. I'm deep in their ecosystem anyway, and rely on their services for work, hobbies, and managing my data. I am stuck with them, unfortunately.
I do block what I can (Meta, Microsoft, Amazon) with Pi Hole and browser extensions. But there's no total escape from an internet footprint, short of dropping off the grid. I'm dependent on Alphabet to live my lifestyle, for better or worse.
The biggest pain with premium is how prevalent in video ads are. Not fun to pay and still see ads anyway.
I wouldn't mind if they were right at the start or at the end. But they're always either 30 - 60 seconds in or in the middle of the video and so many of them are over a minute.
I know this is really bad. And I know they need to make money somehow. But on precedent I just refuse to pay for YouTube premium, having been there since the beginning. Before adverts started showing, and everyone predicted they'd plague us with ads until charging you to get rid of them.
Also a part of me refuses to believe Google can't afford to run YouTube without adverts.
I realize that this is a catch22, but this is where we are at. I really only want to view footage from creators that are willing to give it to me for free without ads. Youtube provided a technical infrastructure for that for about two decades, and it looks like they can't anymore. Fine, but it has clearly been proven that we as a society can make this happen, and I will patiently wait for it to be a thing again. Or I will find something else. But I am not paying a monthly subscription.
Honestly, if I could pay 800 dollars for lifetime access to YouTube, I probably would. Weird right? Thats like 8 years of YouTube premium all at once. YouTube might even shut down in 8 years. But whatever, its not my job to figure these things out and honestly I'm unbothered by it. At the end of the day, I am confident that intwrnet based media will emerge stronger from this.
At the end of the day it is about honesty - are you a small creator reading an ad because that is how you support your business, or are you a large faceless corporation giving me free shit so that I will unknowingly be bound by a EULA that is designed to be impossible to understand, all for the purpose of trying to extract money from me later? Ill take the former, every time.
I'm in the same situation, and I agree. I even got the premium lite plan for 7€ which I find really reasonable with the quality of the content and the amount I watch. I'd rather pay YouTube and content creators than Netflix or Disney anyway.
I actually pay for Nebula already and it has been great so far for me. I use it a lot more than
Youtube and you don't need to sift through a bunch of garbage to find something decent to watch. They just need to add more content creators.
What percentage of yt creators are over there? I pay for premium, but yt is literally my primary video media consumption so I get value out of it. I also use yt music as my streaming service.
Of all creators on YT? A tiny fraction. Less than one hundredth of one percent.
Of the creators that I personally watch? Probably about a quarter to a half. Most of my favourite urbanist channels, excellent history and news channels, lots of amazing media criticism from a variety of angles. And some very fun game shows.
Nebula isn't actually trying to be a general competitor to YouTube. It's curated to be high quality content creators. To a pretty good extent, you can guarantee that if they're on Nebula, they're a good creator—maybe not to your personal taste (there are plenty on there that I have no interest in), but at least good in their niche. All their creators are part owners of it (in a meaningful way, not in a "one share out of a company with millions of shares" kind of way), so they only let in creators that they think they can trust.
And all that, for a price that's less per year than YouTube Premium is for just 2 months. For me, it's a no brainer.
Not that many sadly and from my understanding you need to be invited by them to join. There is 240 currently if it loaded and counted them correctly for me. They have a list of them here. It works for me because a lot of them make exactly the content I am interested into, but might not work or you or anyone else depending on taste.
It would be the same for me. Most of the channels I watch advertise Nebula, unless they advertise Floatplane. With these two I would have >90% of my Youtube watch time covered.
I actually used to have YT Premium because I'm a strong believer that nothing is free, so you either pay with data or money (on anything slightly commercial, not counting FOSS projects made as hobby or under foundations etc. as things get more complex then. But even then I pay/donate for some stuff in the same way of reasoning).
Yet I cancled the YT Premium subscription. Simply for one reason, privacy. I don't mind paying, but then I don't want just no adds, I also want no tracking. I pay with money, so I don't want to pay with data as well having a whole profile made.
Switched to NewPipe with sponsorblock on phone and TV and FreeTube on PC. Got a redirect extension in FireFox automatically sending YT videos to either Invidious or Pipe.
There are a few options and none of them are great.
First we have to split between paying for content and paying for the delivery.
There is already a platform where people pay for the delivery by letting their device be part of the delivery system. That's Bittorrent. You can download by uploading. I don't see why something like the Bittorrent protocol couldn't be adapted to a Youtube like platform. And if the platform only serves a frotend that helps you find the correct torrent and then streams the content in a video player, the demands on the server would be low enough that it could be run using ddonations or something like that. It would basically be a legal version of the Pirate Bay.
For content creation on the other side, that's a whole different can of worms. Content creation takes much more money. I see only two alternatives to ads, sponsorships and direct payments: government-sponsored content and unpaid content.
Government-sponsored content like e.g. BBC stuff is good, but it doessn"t nearly fill every niche that Youtubers etc. currently cover.
Unpaid content could work for some media, e.g. there are a lot of great books or music made by hobbyists without commercial aspirations, but making high-production-value videos without propper funding is just not going to happen at scale.
So all in all, I don't see a future where we aren't going to pay for content in any way.
An issue with the torrent scheme is efficiency. Networks of home computers will suck down considerably more power from (potentially) less than ideal energy sources than dedicated servers in well-planned locations (i.e. near reliable renewable energy sources, with backup generators). I don't see a way to have this without involving large institutions, whether private or public.
Regarding media creation, there's a middle ground between direct payment and government-sponsored: Universal Basic Income, or a related scheme of generic grants for art/education producers. Ensuring people don't starve or become homeless as they start projects or grow large enough to be sustained by direct payments from an audience could foster this sort of growth.
Yeah, when you talk about ideal, home computers will not win. When you talk about an industry that overprovisions servers by ~50% and doesn't even turn these overprovisioned servers off when they don't need them, an industry that lobbies against any push to force them to put solar on their roofs, that lobbies against mandatory haste heat reuse and all that, I believe that a network of home computers will not be much more wasteful. Especially considering that the PCs are ildeing already anyway.
The problem with government-sponsored is, that we have to pay for it anyway. Unless you live in the Emirates, governments usually don't have a money surplus and they need to make money through taxes. So wheter you pay through taxes or through direct contributions, there isn't too much of a difference there.
What about using tecnologies such as Bitcoin and blockchain to find a sustainable mechanism of income for creators / server owners?
Miners already have an economical incentive to build a network and keep expanding it: they literally get paid for producing and maintaining computer power, and why is it working? Because Bitcoin was the first and only available example that made what gold did, but better in a time that was really needed..
We just need to include the web into the equation, building a web and a mechanism of incentives (i would say based on bitcoin) that works better than the current web! Easier said than done that's sure!
We need to think about what every social media platform would want to use because works better than ads and all the other incentives/income methods.
If Satoshi did it, i don't see why can't we do it too..
If you have an android phone with a Google account, you're being tracked already.
As I be see it, I'm going to be tracked by everything on the internet whether I like it or not. So in the case of YouTube, I may as well support the creators I watch hours of content from.
You get tracked if you give up and accept the privacy invasions because "the internet is just like that". Get a phone with an unlocked bootloader, remove the stock Android and install GrapheneOS/LineageOS/CalyxOS.
I totally understand where you are coming from, as I to pay for YT premium. However; when it comes to tracking, it is one of the few applications that I don't think works very well without it. Part of why I enjoy it most of the time is the interesting content the algorithm suggests, that I wouldn't otherwise be aware of.
I don't know the solution to that problem... Maybe the tracking stays within the YT world only, and isn't sold or used anywhere else?
I mean, since we're all here, PeerTube is federated with Lemmy! There are limited numbers of creators on PeerTube right now, but maybe if we can link more videos from there on lemmy and upload some ourselves, we can get the platform into a healthy state. Not that there is nothing there, there is a decent amount uploaded already.
PeerTube won't take off unlike Lemmy did and still does. People won't switch from YouTube to PeerTube because the creators they watch aren't there. Also the YouTube Algorithm is what people make use YouTube in the first place.
Reddit isn't creator based and doesn't necessarily need an Algorithm since the users choose what to see anyways. So the Lemmy experience isn't actually that mich worse than the reddit experience
YT algo is hot garbage, I always have to check the channels of the creators I follow manually. I donate through Patreon and I would be happy to bump up my donations to make it easier for them to move to PeerTube
I'm gonna be honest. I don't see anything wrong with this. I know the majority of us are just coming off some corporate bullshit from reddit, but I don't think it's wrong to not let your very expensive to maintain service be used for free without ads.
I promise that I'm not trying to suck a billionaire's cock when I say that I marvel in awe at YouTube's ability to input and output such astronomical amount of data at any given time, without any complaints.
But this is such a shitty, hostile way to do it. And if you give in and say yes to ads they've already shown where that's going to go, with 10 unskippable ads in a row and 30 second ads.
They could make subscriptions mandatory if they really believe they have a good product, and pass a fat portion of that money to the creators instead.
...except this isn't about the creators, or the users, or the advertisers, it's about Google making more money at the expense of every single other party involved in the platform, and the platform be damned. Textbook late stage enshittification.
YouTube premium revenue is shared with creators based on view time. I don't know what percentage of the subscription cost is shared (I believe I've read 55% is shared but I didn't validate that right now, their help docs say "most" so it's likely over 50%). As I understand it from income breakdown from creators, income from YouTube premium does often surpass Adsense income even when only a small percentage of viewers use YouTube premium.
The larger factor in them doing this is that the value of selling ads has been decreasing substantially the last few years. This means they need to show more ads to make the same money they did before.
This is also part of why every YouTube creator now does their own sponsored ads inside videos, trying to rely only on Adsense isn't viable for them.
YouTube know they have a good product, and lots of people do subscribe to YouTube premium, there is no reason form them to force people onto YouTube premium when lots of people are willing to watch the ads.
I've had youtube premium for several years now. Most of the creators I watch do their best to integrate their sponsorships in an appropriate way. Whether that's choosing a sponsorship related to the video topic, or making it entertaining in its own right.
It's expensive to run servers that hosts tens of billions of videos. If you don't want to pay for access, then pay for no ads. If you don't want to pay for no ads, then watching the ads is the only way. Remember, if you're not buying the product, then you are the product.
Paying for YouTube premium still makes you the product, since you are still being tracked and sold. Hell you could drop over over 2k on a TV, phone, or GPU and still be getting tracked and sold. The old adage of if you aren't paying you are the product no longer applies. It's outdated.
While I'm not opposed to paying for YouTube (it is a service after all) the only way to do so would be by being logged in to YouTube with whatever black box algorithmic tracking and curation that entails. There is no "proper" way to anonymously access YouTube without ads.
I know how obnoxious ads have become on the internet and I've seen how they have progressively gotten longer and more prevalent on YouTube but I don't really know how to feel about this. Conceptually, they are handling and storing so much video data their operating costs must be astronomical. As far as I know, advertisement is the main way they recoup any of that cost so I can't really blame them for this. Maybe they are just reaching a point where they are just too massive to work.
I would agree with you on this if it weren't for the fact that scam ads are so widespread on Youtube and Google that it's almost like they don't care about their users, only money. If they don't care about their users, why should I care about their bottom line. Also, ads I don't have too much of a problem with, but data collection and surveillance I do, and it's hard to block one without blocking the other.
People will choose the most convenient option. It just so happened that, for a brief period, it was more convenient to go through the hassle of installing an adblockers than to sit through the ads for regular users.
The unfortunate reality is that, for some people, moving over to TikTok will be more convenient than watching YouTube ads. Our attention span shrinks a little more, and Google takes one step closer to MySpace.
Youtube makes money from musicians, artists, creators, they wouldn't exist without them. Still, they only give back a small percentage of the profits to the creators. The exploitation fees are a fraction of the money they make. Anyway, lots of people turn off adblock on youtube, most people don't even know it's a thing. So I really dont believe a capitalist company like Google, that have always profit from creators are to pity.
Yeah, im not a fan of people trying to control what I do with my computing hardware. But in youtubes case, at least they pay the creators of monetized videos. I'll still figure out how to block the ads, but it's not like reddit.
YouTube once did a genius and really nice move: Paying the video authors. They realized that treating the people who create the works – that are the entire reason why people use the platform – well and creating an incentive for that work is smart and a good way to grow the platform.
But that time is long gone. YouTube is the monopoly in the market now. They ruin everything that was good about YouTube. They brought the adpocolypse and only pay video authors for videos the content of which they deem friendly to their advertisements business and easy to sell to advertisers based on a completely arbitrary broken automatic system that enforces self censorship on the video authors. All other videos that are still vital to the platform do not get any of the money they make of the viewers the demonetized videos keep on the platform.
They started putting ads on videos that the author did not choose to monetize completely breaking with their system of sharing their revenue with the people who create the basis for that.
While they impose strict arbitrary self censorship on the video authors who want a cut of the revenue their videos allowed to generate they allow a flood of scams and other illegitimate and inappropriate content for advertisers.
They removed the dislike button making the platform much worse for the users just to appeal to advertisers even more.
Yeah, I do think that they will start to try to lower the payments to creators as well, especially as high interest money flushes debt financed cash out of circulation.
Yeah, a part of me wants to immediately want to push back and hope to find better ad blockers for the site, but then I realized I've used YouTube for well over a decade now and all without watching any ads.
Honestly, it might be time for me to finally relent and just pay for premium.
The funny thing is that I can't be bothered to install adblockers for mobile YouTube, despite that being 99% of my phone and YouTube usage. Video platforms are expensive AF, and I get it.
But man, that ad experience just keeps degrading. It really wears on me some days, making me seriously consider Premium.
But now that they are going to block adblockers outright? And especially now that they're paywalling the ability to queue videos in a dynamic playlist?? Something built into TV casting and the desktop app for free? Nah, Google can get fucked. It's ReVanced time.
YMusic is great Android app, too. It's mostly intended for being able to properly use your phone when you want to focus on the audio, i.e. you can freely disable the screen, browse other apps, set timers, tweak the built-in equalizer, that kinda stuff, but it is perfectly functional and complete video player for YouTube as well.
A lot of comments mentioning platforms like Nebula. I feel in this climate we should be continuing to encourage decentralized platforms. As lemmy is to reddit, peertube is to youtube. You can add a support button with links to any payment platforms you want; librapay is a nice one that takes 0% of donations as the platform itself runs on its own donations by a nonprofit.
I can’t seem to figure out peertube. I’ve tried a few different platforms and made sure federation is turned on but I’m not seeing many videos over 1-3 views
I’m not super opposed for paying for a product or service that I use, but the cost they are asking is just too expensive for me. Not that I can’t afford it, but for the 16/month or 23/month for family doesn’t meet my personal value/service.
Even if it were affordable, eventually it will go up. The subscribe-to-everything trend in business right now is pretty clear. Pretty soon we'll see subscription-based clothing.
Not that it's a massive difference, but it's $11.99 if you sign up on the web. The $16 is if you sign up on an iPhone, since that has to go through Apple's subscription service where they take a cut.
For mobile,and I believe pc, newpipe or libretube on fdroid,or their respective websites. Front ends for YouTube,ad free(libretube strips in video commercials too),and totally free. For fdroid tho,enable repositories and add https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/ . its the best way to watch YouTube,imo
I'm sure there's a way to get around it, and if there isn't, then I just won't be using YouTube anymore. I survived before it existed. I'm getting tired of these companies' bullshit.
I'm truly surprised there hasn't been a successful YouTube competitor in the last decade or so.
I suspect the problem is that people wouldn't even pay a penny per video to content creators. From what I've seen of other competing video sites, there's a really serious moderation issue stopping them from wide adoption... So many of the competing sites are full of flat earth / anti-vax / pro-fascism content...
My understanding is that its just straight up not profitable plus network effect. Requires too many resources to run the service and only profitable if doing data harvesting from users in the way that google/etc do.
Exactly. I don't know if it's still the case, but AFAIK even YT has always operated at a loss. Google (or Alphabet) pays the difference from their other profits because YT offers other indirect value to them such as market share and potential future profits.
I’m truly surprised there hasn’t been a successful YouTube competitor in the last decade or so.
Running a video service the size of YouTube carries astronomical traffic and storage costs. Google is probably one of the only companies in the world that can stem that.
There's smaller video sharing sites, like DailyMotion, but those would probably instantly crash and burn if their userbase were to suddenly grow to the size of YouTube's.
It's because google has effectively unlimited resources and first-adopter advantage combined.
The people who originally made youtube in 2005 would have never made money from it, even though the max upload quality was 240p (I remember when 480 on youtube was still considered high quality lol). But they got an audience which is what mattered. When google bought them, they still couldn't make money, but they could prevent ANYONE else making money with a similar product but throwing enough money and creator-focused policy around to make any other platform look just plain stupid.
Even today, how much do you think it costs to store and serve the hundreds of thousands of videos uploaded to YT a DAY? Many of them at 4K res or even 4K60hz???
It's a massive undertaking and nobody can afford to build a competitor. And without youtube, the internet would be a much much smaller place.
I wonder how they will enforce this. If you can just open a private window to bypass it, it won't be very effective. Sure, they could do some fingerprinting, but I imagine avoiding false-positives would be very important, so I doubt they'd get very far with that.
Honestly, the only way I see is implementing a login wall, which I wouldn't put past them. And that's kinda scary. It would render so many links inaccessible to people without a Google account.
Or who knows, maybe they just want to make it more cumbersome and not completely prevent it, to get more people onto YouTube Premium, while the more determined people can continue adblocking because it's not worth fighting a small minority.
Depends how far they're going to take it. If they'll focus on people with a YouTube account and threaten to block their YouTube/Google account, it's one thing. You'll be able to work around it by using incognito mode (assuming you trust they don't spy on you in incognito mode...) or a browser where you're not logged in, or NewPipe etc.
If they threaten to block people who aren't logged in (by IP and by the fact they already spy on your phone and know your Google account) then it's another thing and nothing will be able to bypass it. They would burn a lot of bridges by doing that and expose themselves to some huge fallout and scrutiny about privacy, but you'd have no choice but to watch ads or not use YouTube.
well, hopefully their implementation has as many holes as everything else they do. with a custom rom you can even spoof free unlimited google photos, as if you're using a google pixel
Nebula is a pretty decent paid platform with a lot of short form YouTube style content on it. Pretty sure its significantly better on privacy policy as well.
Pretty sure its significantly better on privacy policy
Without even reading their privacy policy, this much is pretty obvious. Nebula has a very simple, more traditional business model. You pay them money, they give you product. (Namely, streaming video.) Their business model doesn't include personal data in any way.
Not paying youtube a cent until they remove all the transphobes and quit blasting people with their shit ass bigoted content. I'll pirate and ad block just to spite them every step of the way. Make your bed with fascists, lay in it.
Right now the #1 alternative is Odysee. While Odysee itself is a centralized company its just as open sourced front end for the decentralized LBRY block chain.
As of now Odysee has far more videos, features, and download speeds then any other YouTube alternative.
If you're interested in supporting an alternative I reccomend downloading the "watch on odysee" extension which redirects YouTube videos that areavailible on Odysee, to Odysee. (Firefox)(Chrome)
Personally I can't think of a single traditional value worth preserving and I've got nothing worth conserving - given the pollution of the right that modern day corruption has completed, I'll stick to the lesser, at least until I can't dodge advertising anymore.
If you don't like it, then fork the and start your own curated version of Odysee. That's the beauty of federated software.
And while yes in its current state the userbase is pretty toxic; that's the price to pay when you have a platform with total free speech. The early adopters are always going to be the ones who rely on it the most (unsavory individuals). However this is no argument against free speech in the same way that criminals being the first ones to adopt privacy related projects, is no argument against privacy.
Considering how big and relevant YouTube is, I don't see it getting replaced by PeerTubr. The alternative at the moment are apps like ViewTube which is a custom front-end for YouTube that removes all the ads and tracking
Have we got any reps from ReVanced over here yet?
It's not a federated or decentralised approach, but it at least removes the layer of scum enveloping YouTube.
Remember the time when we used to search for and share funny ads? They could've done that, but no, they chose to make shitty ads that nobody wants to see.
I'm happy paying a Nebula subscription, (another video site started by a group of youtubers, mostly engineering/tech/documentary types) because I know that the creators are getting all my money after reasonable platform costs.
I won't consider paying for YT Premium (or Spotify) until they become a lot more generous to creators, and stop their insane copyright strike algorithm and banned-words audio scanner from demonetising and hiding random videos (Jake Broe, Joe Blogs, Denys Davydov, Ryan McBeth etc are always having to edit and reupload to cut some harmless snippet) and whole channels (Metatron) all the time.
If I didn't get two back to back 30min videos from a politician running for election in the middle of a kids video I might have hesitated on the ad blocker, slightly. If you know who Clive Palmer is, it gives it more context.
I signed up to Odysee the other day to upload a video. It was too hard and I gave up.
You need to be confirmed to upload. Their options were:
Do a test transaction ($1 to CC). Broken, not available at this time.
Pay some money (CC transaction). Also broken (I checked my bank history to make sure the money didn't get taken anyway. I would have been happy to pay a few dollars to host a video, I know it's not trivial)
Join their discord and say "Hi" to the verif bot. The bot said "message me with details of your IRL public social media accounts". I don't have those.
Nope nope nope. Made an account on Vimeo and uploaded there instead. Everything worked.
Maybe I'm just not the target audience? Bigger barriers to entry might only let the more profitable people pass? Not sure.
I've been on Odysee for a while and immediately signed up for premium. Happy to give my money to not-youtube. Unfortunately, there aren't many of my favourite creators on there yet, so I still have to return to YT for some things.
I’ve already migrated from Twitter to Mastodon, Reddit to Lemmy, looks like I’ll have to test disabling my traffic to YouTube. I control what content reaches my eyes on my devices, not Google. That is a hard line for me.
I'm thinking about recording my screen monitor while I'm playing some video games and upload the videos both on PeerTube and on YouTube. With a slightly little difference between them: the YouTube version will show messages encouraging the use of adblockers and leading people to PeerTube.
Now I have to find a good software and configuration to record my gameplays on my "potato" computer.
I use OBS for screen recording. While it's not necessarily "simple", once it's set up I usually just fire it up and hit a hotkey to start recording whatever game is running. And I get a lot more control of the result. And there are tons of plugins and support for it out there as it is popular with streamers.
A lot are also on alternative platforms like nebula. It's true that it's only a select few, but they tend to be also the most interesting YouTube channels.
To nowhere. It may take some time getting used to not watching my favorite content creators, but I think I'll manage just fine. I'd rather not use youtube-ish sites at all instead of being forced to watch ads every few minutes.
Sadly unlikely. People don't come to youtube because they like youtube. People come to youtube because the content they want is on youtube, and the content creators surely don't mind the ads, so that content will remain on youtube.
A number -- not all -- of the content creators are creating content to be paid by YouTube, so the ads or some kind of consumer payment or something is kind of intrinsic to the system for those.
“We want to inform viewers that ad blockers violate YouTube’s Terms of Service, and make it easier for them to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium for an ad free experience,” the company said in its email to The Verge.
Wow, thanks, YouTube! I always had such a hard time disabling my ad blocker - I'm so glad you've made it easier for me!
Really, though, I don't see this ending well for YouTube. I'd bet there'll be an ad blocking option that works to bypass this within a week.
It's the sheer patrimony of statements like these that really annoy me. I get that things have costs and they also have to deliver a profit; that's just business. But why can't they just have the guts to openly say that rather than dress it up in all the bullshit
Within a week? I think my ad blocker already handles it; I haven’t noticed ads on YouTube ever, on my own devices, and haven’t seen their latest messaging either.
Maybe an unpopular opinion here… but checking my stats, since buying YouTube premium my account has watched over 50 days worth of ad free video content.
Now whilst I wish more of money went to the creators themselves, I can’t pretend I don’t get value out of the subscription. Especially compared to something like Netflix.
I have 6 subscriptions and YouTube is the last one I’d consider cancelling.
They are already harvesting all our data, so it's not like they aren't getting anything out of us. And it's not like paying them opts users out of being tracked either. So what exactly is the benefit to paying a data harvesting company that isn't going to stop, and users are what provides them that info they need in the first place. Including their attempts at AI search that will rely on users to train it.
I prefer to do ublock origin/sponsorblock + patreon. Gives the creators a bigger cut and I still don't see ads. I'm currently at $15/mo across all creators but judging by Louis Rossmann's video on lifetime ad revenue per user it doesn't seem hard to offset any loss from ad blocking (iirc he said it was like <$1 of ad revenue for your lifetime of watching a creator). So I feel pretty good about giving most of the channels I watch casually $1/mo, especially when patreon's cut is so much smaller than youtube premium's.
I have ublock on my desktop but for me with a wife and kids who who have their own devices, the TVs in the house etc, the convenience of never getting ads on any device is really good.
And for me personally I don’t mind paying if I get value in return, and I do.
I bought premium just so my wife and me can listen to music while commuting. Not having to rely on ublock origin (which I still have on my desktop at home) is a nice extra, but mobile was my main concern. I'd like to keep the usage of tools like Vanced at a minimum. They could stop working on the one day when I'm stuck in a train for hours.
That's more a benefit for them than you though. I think people are more asking what's the benefit for users with the know how and willingness to implement what features they want for themselves.
I'm the same, and I actually like YouTube Music app too, prefer it over Spotify.
Agree that I would prefer their business practices to be more supportive of content creators.
Conversations around YT on the internet always blows my mind. People are so adamant that they deserve an ad free, subscription free service from YT. I'm with you, personally. I've had premium for years and I've cancelled many other subscriptions in that time and premium is the absolute last one I'll cancel. Works for my whole fam, includes yt music, I watch or listen to YT content literally hours every day, for years. The value is a no brainer for me.
I do wonder how the subs get split. Like is it just a bonus based on general stats or stats of users paying?
For me I use the phone app and on a TV so not having to setup extra ad blocking nonsense is nice. I also watch it all the time and do want to support people making content. I've done the Patreon thing some and tried to bounce around who I was giving a few dollars to. More convenient if the YouTube sub just benefits the people I'm watching.
My understanding is that for free users watching your content you get a percentage of the ad revenue. But views from premium subscribers earns you a flat rate not dependant on advertisements, and that flat rate is higher than what you’d get from an ad supported view.
The general consensus is YouTube is still greedy with the split , but at least they are offering more from a premium view.
The real question is if creators still need to do that dystopian self-censorship to avoid being demonetized on the subscription money even though there are no advertisers who mandate advertiser-friendly language or content.
I already mostly use YouTube's mobile site in Firefox on Android with plugins to make the experience manageable. If they break that then I'm going to go crazy.
What pisses me off is when I have some appliance or vehicle malfunction and it bombards me with ads when there's an emergency and trying to find information quickly on mobile. It's especially annoying when that information doesn't exist anywhere else on the internet.
I'd be interested to know whether they data-mine premium account activity. If yes, then they have a link to payment information and thus personal identity to link whatever they're data-mining to. If no, if you can buy privacy, that might be interesting.
Good. Ad-blocking is piracy. Those content creators you are watching are depending on the revenue from ads. Either watch ads or buy premium. Third option? Don't watch youtube.
People have a problem when the ads are so intrusive and prevalent they get in the way of the actual content. People have a problem with ad networks acting like obsessed stalkers -- building incredibly detailed profiles of them as a person and selling that information to others.
Nope sorry, Youtube gets punished for bad ad practices. You don't get to pretend that the content creator is the victim of the ad-blocking user when YT controls the platform.
Lmao yes they do. Literally Google any content creators revenue. Most don't even have sponsors. Keep lying to yourself. Just know that you're stealing from them
I'm very sympathetic to this viewpoint. If anything, I actually think adblocking is worse than conventional piracy (though nowhere near as bad as actual theft), because with piracy you're costing the creator nothing and getting their stuff for free. With adblocking you're getting it free and costing them the fees for bandwidth. It's a tiny fee on a per-user basis, but it's real. Not as bad as actual theft though because you're not depriving them of the ability to sell what they created to someone else.
My problem with YouTube in particular is that they're just so damn shitty to the people that provide them value. Like Reddit, but not quite as extreme. For years YouTube has been slow to act to demonetise actual bad actors, while good actors constantly get caught up with bullshit abuses of their Content ID (with public domain content being detected, and fair use exemptions to use of copyrighted material being ignored). And more recently, with their demonetisation of marginalised creators simply for talking about their own lived experience.
I used to pay for YouTube Red back when it existed, happily. But for me the last straw came in 2018 when they started screwing over small-time creators by removing longstanding small creators from the partner programme as a lazy overreaction to a few not-longstanding bad actors.
These days, I watch as many creators as I can on Nebula, which I happily pay for, and would have happily paid for a lifetime membership of, if that offer had been available for just 1 week longer than it actually was, despite objectively the lifetime membership probably not being a good deal for the individual user. I'm happy to pay for a good experience, but not for a company that screws over its suppliers so badly.
Not watching YouTube and ad blockers are almost the same option as far as YouTube and creators are concerned, except Google loses a fraction of a scent in bandwidth and the the creator doesn't get the view counts or engagement.
Google can be counted on to make everything worse at all opportunities.
Corporations in general. Reddit with their API prices, Adobe with their montly subscription for rotating pages in the Adobe Reader, Netflix with their lockdown on account sharing... Capitalism yay!
Everyone's out for their pound of flesh and man, does it hurt. 🥴
don't be evil
They got rid of that motto years ago, and it’s been quite a ride ever since.
They didn't, it's still at the very end of their code of conduct.
Really? I just remembering that it was a big deal with they dropped it. Maybe it's still there but no longer the motto?
Well, at least we can count on them to cancel this initiative in short order.
What absolute wankers! In case anyone's adblock goes south, here are some YouTube alternatives:
For Watching YouTube
For Uploading
For Android:
Newpipe or Tubular (Newpipe X Sponsorblock fork)
VueTube (still under development, the team is working slow because it's pretty small, they have a few time to spend on it and they need devs, it's a complete FOSS alternative to Vanced, and will have most of its features including optional Google log in with interactions)
If you need to login and have a full YouTube experience: Revancedapp
LibreTube is very good as well.
I tried it and I still prefer Newpipe, but it's cool to have a lot of alternatives for everyone!
Newpipe is perfect for me, been using it for months, now when I want to watch a video, I don't wind up watching whatever, I have a more purposeful experience.
Yes, Newpipe works great, I use both because I want to interact with my favorite creators and share my history and lists with the PC so I'm forced to log in, so the best option for that is a patched YouTube app like revanced (I used to use vanced until a few months ago when they definitely killed it).
I quite like SkyTube, too.
I haven't tried it, but it's cool there are more alternatives.
No revanced? I've been using it since vanced broke with an older update and it's been working great for me
PeerTube is awesome. Also its federated with lemmy!
Thank you! Is Invidious going anywhere? I saw something about a DMCA takedown from YouTube.
I'd be surprised if Google completely stamped it out. They're on Codeberg now, so that'll make takedowns trickier. It's also distributed, so taking down the Invidious websites is virtually impossible.
Also, while Google probably has pretty good lawyers, I'm not sure how well they'll stand up if they go to court.
The official reason they gave for the takedown is also false. They claimed that invidious is using the youtube api without permission, which it isn't.
That's pretty cool, actually! Nice work!
This is something I wanted since I have discovered Newpipe. Thank you, it's very nice to have something like this on desktop
The one thing the Reddit exodus has taught me, is that I'm almost eager for a reason to ditch my social media and either find something new or simply take back that time and do something more fulfilling anyway.
I'm so much happier not being constantly blasted with advertisements, that now when I have to go back on insta or FB for whatever reason, I can't stand more than 30 seconds before I nope back off.
Looking forward to axing YouTube from my life next.
I left FB and Instagram about 3 years ago. At first I felt sad because I was "disconnected" from my large network of hundreds of people I know or have met. The truth was the majority of these "friends" weren't actually participating in my life at all. Those networks for most part were just allowing for some sort of passive consumption of our lives and when I had finally left, it was great. The hour or so I would spend trying to "keep up" with everyone was given back to me and it was refreshing to catch up with friends because we actually get to catch up.
Recently though, I spun up an instance of a private social network just for my family using a web app called HumHub. There's about 20 members and we use it just for our small family. No outsiders, no ads, no spam, just us. It takes me back to a time where social media was simple.
I just watched Wendover's video on how they built Nebula. Most of the content I watch is on that platform, so I'd be happy to just ditch YouTube if they move forward with this.
I just watched Wendover's video on how they built Nebula. Most of the content I watch is on that platform, so I'd be happy to just ditch YouTube if they move forward with this.
And also, are people who are determined not to watch advertising going to be the ones that cave and buy some crap if you can force them to watch it?
Exactly - If anything ever happens to permanently disable my ability to block advertisements, I'll drop that service cold and never look back.
I don't think google cares if you buy stuff or not. They are just selling ads.
But I agree with overall idea: if the ads become unavoidable, I'll just stop watching youtube.
What if… We all got YouTube Premium, is Google then earning more or breakeven, when they cannot sell or display ads? I mean, there are companies paying Google to display there ads, that revenue would be gone.
They are still going to sell your data even if you get Premium.
Companies are going out of their way to ignore the fact that "the easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates." - Gabe Newell
I consider adblocking to be in the same boat. Piracy/Adblocking only exists because it's not a pricing issue. It's a service issue. By making the free version even more intrusive ON PURPOSE, they're not pushing as many people to buy a subscription as they are pushing people to install adblockers. If YouTube only ever showed a quick 10-15 sec ad at the very beginning of a video, I'd be less inclined to go out of my way to find and install an adblocker (and maybe even eventually just buy a subscription) than if they force feed me back to back, 30-second, unskippable ads.
It's the same with those stupid fucking commercials that run ALL the time and try and be as annoying as possible. If I find your ad to be annoying and frequent and shoved down my throat all the time, I will vehemently and actively go out of my way to AVOID that product, not be more inclined to buy it.
Decreasing the convenience of ad blocking, makes the subscription more convenient in comparison.
A percentage of people will genuinely sub from this, they don't exactly lose any bandwidth from those who don't.
No built in sponsorblock automatically kills it for me.
It's been years since I saw an ad on YouTube.
It's really annoying and I was even surprised when I got to know they have implemented multiple ads on a single video.
Last time I saw an ad was when it was a single ad in the beginning of the video.
Relevant Tumblr post
Here it is in text format so ya'll don't have to type it out. I haven't verified that it works but by the looks of it it just makes the Adblock sensor report a false negative. [edit, fixed some spacings that sneaked it's way into the filter upon copying it earlier.]
The first line has a few extra spaces, here's it fixed:
The realer MVP
The real mvp
Can youtube not try to fuck people over for 5 minutes?
Can <insert basically any corporation> not try to fuck people over for 5 minutes?
Welcome to capitalism
Youtube is a prime example of why monopolies are bad
Decentralize! FEDERATE EVERYTHING!
I agree, the internet needs to go back to its roots. Putting your eggs in one basket is just a bad idea.
At some point the ratio of convenience to quality got all out of whack. Most people I know use maybe three different platforms at most and get angered by all of them. My internet experience peaked when I was checking 20 extremely specific forums regularly and using in-game chat 90% of the time (vent/teamspeak were reserved for raid night).
As much as I dislike ads, "Company wants to make revenue from its product" is not a prime example of why monopolies are bad.
Youtube has done a lot more bad shit than push ads everywhere
Why? Can you elaborate?
If a company has no competition, being a monopoly, it's basically free to do whatever it wants. Youtube controls the video streaming market of the internet. If they choose to not pay content creators, to run 10 ads in a row every 3 minutes, or to ban content creators for saying something their automods think is a bad word, what will you do? Where else will you turn? Odds are there's nothing for you on Vimeo. So you either make do with how Youtube operates, or you don't get to watch cat videos, or video essays on WW2, or playthroughs of Super Mario Sunshine, or what have you.
I had as context in mind that they won't allow you to watch videos without paying for it via subscription or advertisment
Bring able to skip 5 seconds into a 14-30 second ad isn't a huge inconvenience. When doing something AFK the ad ends in a reasonable amount of time so you're right back to your background music or whatever. I've never taken issue with that. I'm not a huge fan of the newer strategy that run two ads in a row, but it's still tolerable. What I deplore is the occasional infomercial ad that'll run for anywhere from 5 minutes to 20 hours without intervention. Those are the reason I run an ad blocker on the desktop.
On mobile there's fewer options. Running adblock on Firefox works for now, but if that gets neutered I won't cry. Another option is to install an app that works with the YouTube app to automatically skip ads after five seconds. If youtube takes action against those apps I'll spend a lot less time on YouTube.
This harkens to the current reddit situation. I'm only here because I got tired of their incessant "get our app" prompts on mobile and just started looking into getting an app right when the shit hit the fan. Forcing intrusive advertising on users is a great way to alienate them.
maybe you missed the part where they are not only trying to get rid of adblockers, but also are trying to change over to at least 30 seconds of unskippable ads
Time to go to PeerTube. (federated! Bonus)
It's definitely not ideal, but since YT has become my primary video media content, and it's also my music streaming services. The cost has value for my family.
I am technical enough to get things like revanced installed, or others. Even for our set top boxes.
The amount of energy truly prevent tracking is endless. For me premium does pay the content creators more for my views and I don't see/hear any platform ads.
It's not ideal, but every other streaming service you sign into is profiling you too.
Inside my house/Network I do run pihole, and I use brave browser and it's shield, as well as unlock origin.
Ideal? No, I'd rather everything be free but that's not reality
I will just avoid their bullshit by using a different YouTube front-end.
Won't they also be affected? Also I never used one, can you name a few good ones?
I am 43 and I remember growing up, people in the early days of the internet were calling people in my age group (late genx/early millenial) a generation that will be "impossible to advertise to." For me, it's rang very true. I can't think of a single time I ever saw an ad for anything and it made me want to spend money on a product or service. But I guess that hasn't been the norm, or ads would be dead.
Scrapers assemble!
How is scraping going to help, not a power user so just a curious question?
There are apps like NewPipe that pretend to be a regular browser but show the user an optimized video interface. And no ads of course.
They're in a constant arms race with YouTube to figure out where the actual video and the other stuff (comments, video info, related videos etc.) are on the page, and YouTube keeps moving them around on purpose too.
The other reply encompassed it really well, but essentially scraping is very very difficult to stop while also keeping YouTube videos publicly accessible (If the video and audio are playing on your computer, there isn't really a foolproof way to stop that from being captured). Whereas using the YouTube API to get videos can be easily stopped by Google.
YouTube is seriously forgetting it's role. I liked it better when it was dbz videos to Linkin Park and looney tunes. We use YouTube to not have a premium service then maybe contribute to the creators we like. We do NOT need yet another "streaming service" bill. They're getting out of hand.
Man, 144p AMVs were peak internet.
DBZ Music Videos, that takes me back to the 00's.
A prediction…
YouTube: Show them this ad. Browser: Sure. OK they watched it. YouTube: Really? That was too fast. It was a three minute ad! Browser: Oh, right. Well they’ve definitely watched it now. YouTube: You sure? Browser: Totally.
Something that youtube can do is open the ad on a background tab, muted and with width and lenght as minimum as possible. People don't want to see that shit, but want the ad revenue, so I guess it's a win/win situation?
I am constantly on YouTube. I have a stable of creators I follow and watching them has replaced the time I would have spent on other streaming services. It’s how I chill.
So I signed up for YouTube Premium and watch it on my TV with no ads. I have no complaints. I get full HD videos, streamers get paid, YouTube gets paid, and everyone is happy.
If one of your reasons for using YouTube premium is "streamers get paid", you should probably look into things a bit further.
The vast majority of YouTube premium revenue goes towards music publishers who, statistically, don't have any relation to the content you watch, and contribute nothing towards it.
The content you watch likely still has embedded advertising because YouTube has some of the worst, if not the worst, rates paid to people who actually create the videos on their platform (this means there's no such thing as "ad free YouTube" without using an ad blocker, even if you pay for premium)
I also use YouTube music instead of Spotify or Apple so I am fine with music rights holders getting paid. I haven’t seen any ads on my premium and I have had it for years and use it on my laptop, tvs, and tablets. The only ads I see are the sponsored segments in videos that not even an ad blocker can block because it’s part of the video done by the creator themselves.
check out a Firefox extension called SponsorBlock. It's updated by users but is pretty current and can be set to skip past self promotion and in video advertising.
Sponsor block is pretty good for those. But yeah I'm also a YouTube premium member for similar reasons, also had a Google music sub back in the day that converted over.
Just hate that some browsers in app can't find my login on android and play the ad rather then running the YouTube app.
Yeah, when Google music shutdown, YouTube Music cost as much as Spotify, and includes YouTube premium. Pretty sure it still does.
The people who complain about how much premium costs, are probably already paying for another music streaming service.
In which case, yeah, you're only using half of what you pay for.
I mean, is this surprising? Long-form video is actually decently expensive to serve and other platforms have a subscription model.
It is way harder to provide an effective platform for content than it is to deliver actual content, especially as effort/content has close to zero effect on vitality/attention/profitability, while the aspects we want in a platform (especially in regards to privacy) are entirely unprofitable. As someone who uses adblock and generally dislikes the corporate aspect of YouTube I at least has to acknowledge that YouTube has to make money somehow, and that in-video sponsors seems like a win-win for everyone involved, especially when you can skip them pretty much effortlessly.
Normally I wouldn't even comment this shit, but as we are (hopefully) part of a shift to actual community driven platforms (fediverse in general), I think we have to aggressively discuss how to monetize these platforms enough so that they don't actively drain the wallets of the people maintaining them, and this is a very relevant aspect of that discussion.
Hopefully not too ranty, extremely inebriated.
I think this is the most important thing in this whole thread
It is way harder to provide an effective platform for content than it is to deliver actual content, especially as effort/content has close to zero effect on vitality/attention/profitability, while the aspects we want in a platform (especially in regards to privacy) are entirely unprofitable. As someone who uses adblock and generally dislikes the corporate aspect of YouTube I at least has to acknowledge that YouTube has to make money somehow, and that in-video sponsors seems like a win-win for everyone involved, especially when you can skip them pretty much effortlessly.
Normally I wouldn't even comment this shit, but as we are (hopefully) part of a shift to actual community driven platforms (fediverse in general), I think we have to aggressively discuss how to monetize these platforms enough that they don't actively drain the wallets of the people maintaining them, and this is a very relevant aspect of that discussion.
Hopefully not too ranty, extremely inebriated.
It is way harder to provide an effective platform for content than it is to deliver actual content, especially as effort/content has close to zero effect on vitality/attention/profitability, while the aspects we want in a platform (especially in regards to privacy) are entirely unprofitable. As someone who uses adblock and generally dislikes the corporate aspect of YouTube I at least has to acknowledge that YouTube has to make money somehow, and that in-video sponsors seems like a win-win for everyone involved, especially when you can skip them pretty much effortlessly.
Normally I wouldn't even comment this shit, but as we are (hopefully) part of a shift to actual community driven platforms (fediverse in general), I think we have to aggressively discuss how to monetize these platforms enough that they don't actively drain the wallets of the people maintaining them, and this is a very relevant aspect of that discussion.
Hopefully not too ranty, extremely inebriated.
It is way harder to provide an effective platform for content than it is to deliver actual content, especially as effort/content has close to zero effect on vitality/attention/profitability, while the aspects we want in a platform (especially in regards to privacy) are entirely unprofitable. As someone who uses adblock and generally dislikes the corporate aspect of YouTube I at least has to acknowledge that YouTube has to make money somehow, and that in-video sponsors seems like a win-win for everyone involved, especially when you can skip them pretty much effortlessly.
Normally I wouldn't even comment this shit, but as we are (hopefully) part of a shift to actual community driven platforms (fediverse in general), I think we have to aggressively discuss how to monetize these platforms enough that they don't actively drain the wallets of the people maintaining them, and this is a very relevant aspect of that discussion.
Hopefully not too ranty, extremely inebriated.
I've blocked their ads for years. I support content creators by buying merchandise and with Patreon.
After hearing about this, I've decided to give YouTube Premium a try. It seems like an easier and more consistent way for me to support creators. I watch YT almost daily, and get a lot of value from it. I hate ads and refuse to watch them, but Premium users don't see them.
I wouldn't blame anyone for walking away from YouTube over this. But for me at least, this was kind of a no-brainer.
I know Google tracks users and targets us with ads. I'm deep in their ecosystem anyway, and rely on their services for work, hobbies, and managing my data. I am stuck with them, unfortunately.
I do block what I can (Meta, Microsoft, Amazon) with Pi Hole and browser extensions. But there's no total escape from an internet footprint, short of dropping off the grid. I'm dependent on Alphabet to live my lifestyle, for better or worse.
The biggest pain with premium is how prevalent in video ads are. Not fun to pay and still see ads anyway.
I wouldn't mind if they were right at the start or at the end. But they're always either 30 - 60 seconds in or in the middle of the video and so many of them are over a minute.
Sponsorblock can help with that .. if you're watching through something that can use it.
https://sponsor.ajay.app/
If we're lucky, in time (and with enough YouTube premium subscribers) the need for YouTubers to have 3rd party sponsorships will decrease.
If we're lucky, in time (and with enough YouTube premium subscribers) the need for YouTubers to have 3rd party sponsorships will decrease.
I know this is really bad. And I know they need to make money somehow. But on precedent I just refuse to pay for YouTube premium, having been there since the beginning. Before adverts started showing, and everyone predicted they'd plague us with ads until charging you to get rid of them.
Also a part of me refuses to believe Google can't afford to run YouTube without adverts.
If we're lucky, in time (and with enough YouTube premium subscribers) the need for YouTubers to have 3rd party sponsorships will decrease.
Why would creators ever say no to more money?
Because ad spots don't fit in well to videos. And they are a pain to negotiate and often (depending on the partner) limit what can be in the videos.
Yeah, but come on man, at the end of the day video makers won't care and why should they. They aren't exactly making art over there.
I get that people have to get payed somehow. But without public funding, it is always going to devolve into some kind of shitshow.
... that's why YouTube premium is a thing. Over 50% of the monthly subscription is distributed among the creators you view in a month.
Okay, but I dont want to pay any of them.
I realize that this is a catch22, but this is where we are at. I really only want to view footage from creators that are willing to give it to me for free without ads. Youtube provided a technical infrastructure for that for about two decades, and it looks like they can't anymore. Fine, but it has clearly been proven that we as a society can make this happen, and I will patiently wait for it to be a thing again. Or I will find something else. But I am not paying a monthly subscription.
Honestly, if I could pay 800 dollars for lifetime access to YouTube, I probably would. Weird right? Thats like 8 years of YouTube premium all at once. YouTube might even shut down in 8 years. But whatever, its not my job to figure these things out and honestly I'm unbothered by it. At the end of the day, I am confident that intwrnet based media will emerge stronger from this.
At the end of the day it is about honesty - are you a small creator reading an ad because that is how you support your business, or are you a large faceless corporation giving me free shit so that I will unknowingly be bound by a EULA that is designed to be impossible to understand, all for the purpose of trying to extract money from me later? Ill take the former, every time.
I'm in the same situation, and I agree. I even got the premium lite plan for 7€ which I find really reasonable with the quality of the content and the amount I watch. I'd rather pay YouTube and content creators than Netflix or Disney anyway.
If they will actually do that, I'll pay for a subscription. To Nebula.
I actually pay for Nebula already and it has been great so far for me. I use it a lot more than Youtube and you don't need to sift through a bunch of garbage to find something decent to watch. They just need to add more content creators.
What percentage of yt creators are over there? I pay for premium, but yt is literally my primary video media consumption so I get value out of it. I also use yt music as my streaming service.
Of all creators on YT? A tiny fraction. Less than one hundredth of one percent.
Of the creators that I personally watch? Probably about a quarter to a half. Most of my favourite urbanist channels, excellent history and news channels, lots of amazing media criticism from a variety of angles. And some very fun game shows.
Nebula isn't actually trying to be a general competitor to YouTube. It's curated to be high quality content creators. To a pretty good extent, you can guarantee that if they're on Nebula, they're a good creator—maybe not to your personal taste (there are plenty on there that I have no interest in), but at least good in their niche. All their creators are part owners of it (in a meaningful way, not in a "one share out of a company with millions of shares" kind of way), so they only let in creators that they think they can trust.
And all that, for a price that's less per year than YouTube Premium is for just 2 months. For me, it's a no brainer.
Not that many sadly and from my understanding you need to be invited by them to join. There is 240 currently if it loaded and counted them correctly for me. They have a list of them here. It works for me because a lot of them make exactly the content I am interested into, but might not work or you or anyone else depending on taste.
It would be the same for me. Most of the channels I watch advertise Nebula, unless they advertise Floatplane. With these two I would have >90% of my Youtube watch time covered.
I actually used to have YT Premium because I'm a strong believer that nothing is free, so you either pay with data or money (on anything slightly commercial, not counting FOSS projects made as hobby or under foundations etc. as things get more complex then. But even then I pay/donate for some stuff in the same way of reasoning).
Yet I cancled the YT Premium subscription. Simply for one reason, privacy. I don't mind paying, but then I don't want just no adds, I also want no tracking. I pay with money, so I don't want to pay with data as well having a whole profile made.
Switched to NewPipe with sponsorblock on phone and TV and FreeTube on PC. Got a redirect extension in FireFox automatically sending YT videos to either Invidious or Pipe.
Would definetely prefer to pay than being tracked...
But i also feel like the time is mature to produce a new type of web where nor ads, nor user payments are required, i think we'll get there some day..
No ads and no user payment?
So...... who pays to keep the servers going? Who pays to produce the content?
That stuff is expensive! We're paying for it somehow.
There are a few options and none of them are great.
First we have to split between paying for content and paying for the delivery.
There is already a platform where people pay for the delivery by letting their device be part of the delivery system. That's Bittorrent. You can download by uploading. I don't see why something like the Bittorrent protocol couldn't be adapted to a Youtube like platform. And if the platform only serves a frotend that helps you find the correct torrent and then streams the content in a video player, the demands on the server would be low enough that it could be run using ddonations or something like that. It would basically be a legal version of the Pirate Bay.
For content creation on the other side, that's a whole different can of worms. Content creation takes much more money. I see only two alternatives to ads, sponsorships and direct payments: government-sponsored content and unpaid content.
Government-sponsored content like e.g. BBC stuff is good, but it doessn"t nearly fill every niche that Youtubers etc. currently cover.
Unpaid content could work for some media, e.g. there are a lot of great books or music made by hobbyists without commercial aspirations, but making high-production-value videos without propper funding is just not going to happen at scale.
So all in all, I don't see a future where we aren't going to pay for content in any way.
An issue with the torrent scheme is efficiency. Networks of home computers will suck down considerably more power from (potentially) less than ideal energy sources than dedicated servers in well-planned locations (i.e. near reliable renewable energy sources, with backup generators). I don't see a way to have this without involving large institutions, whether private or public.
Regarding media creation, there's a middle ground between direct payment and government-sponsored: Universal Basic Income, or a related scheme of generic grants for art/education producers. Ensuring people don't starve or become homeless as they start projects or grow large enough to be sustained by direct payments from an audience could foster this sort of growth.
Yeah, when you talk about ideal, home computers will not win. When you talk about an industry that overprovisions servers by ~50% and doesn't even turn these overprovisioned servers off when they don't need them, an industry that lobbies against any push to force them to put solar on their roofs, that lobbies against mandatory haste heat reuse and all that, I believe that a network of home computers will not be much more wasteful. Especially considering that the PCs are ildeing already anyway.
The problem with government-sponsored is, that we have to pay for it anyway. Unless you live in the Emirates, governments usually don't have a money surplus and they need to make money through taxes. So wheter you pay through taxes or through direct contributions, there isn't too much of a difference there.
What about using tecnologies such as Bitcoin and blockchain to find a sustainable mechanism of income for creators / server owners?
Miners already have an economical incentive to build a network and keep expanding it: they literally get paid for producing and maintaining computer power, and why is it working? Because Bitcoin was the first and only available example that made what gold did, but better in a time that was really needed..
We just need to include the web into the equation, building a web and a mechanism of incentives (i would say based on bitcoin) that works better than the current web! Easier said than done that's sure!
We need to think about what every social media platform would want to use because works better than ads and all the other incentives/income methods.
If Satoshi did it, i don't see why can't we do it too..
If you have an android phone with a Google account, you're being tracked already.
As I be see it, I'm going to be tracked by everything on the internet whether I like it or not. So in the case of YouTube, I may as well support the creators I watch hours of content from.
Software doesn’t has to be this way. Humans define their own way and the Fediverse is showing us this.
You get tracked if you give up and accept the privacy invasions because "the internet is just like that". Get a phone with an unlocked bootloader, remove the stock Android and install GrapheneOS/LineageOS/CalyxOS.
I totally understand where you are coming from, as I to pay for YT premium. However; when it comes to tracking, it is one of the few applications that I don't think works very well without it. Part of why I enjoy it most of the time is the interesting content the algorithm suggests, that I wouldn't otherwise be aware of.
I don't know the solution to that problem... Maybe the tracking stays within the YT world only, and isn't sold or used anywhere else?
I am doing the same thing on my phone and PCs but how did you manage to get that on your TV? Is it through the TV's web browser?
I mean, since we're all here, PeerTube is federated with Lemmy! There are limited numbers of creators on PeerTube right now, but maybe if we can link more videos from there on lemmy and upload some ourselves, we can get the platform into a healthy state. Not that there is nothing there, there is a decent amount uploaded already.
PeerTube won't take off unlike Lemmy did and still does. People won't switch from YouTube to PeerTube because the creators they watch aren't there. Also the YouTube Algorithm is what people make use YouTube in the first place.
Reddit isn't creator based and doesn't necessarily need an Algorithm since the users choose what to see anyways. So the Lemmy experience isn't actually that mich worse than the reddit experience
Creators also need to make money. I doubt Peertube has ad revenue to split with them.
In fairness to YouTube, creators do keep about half the money (in exchange for YouTube hosting the content).
I don't think that's thaat much of a deal. Most youtubers also need additional revenue streams like patreon and mearch and sponsorships.
It’s a really good point. It’s both the algo and the creators the keep us there.
YT algo is hot garbage, I always have to check the channels of the creators I follow manually. I donate through Patreon and I would be happy to bump up my donations to make it easier for them to move to PeerTube
I'm going to test blocking YouTube for having unskippable ads. :)
I've tried changing to odysee and peertube. I just wished more creators would upload their videos to other platforms and not just YT.
I'm gonna be honest. I don't see anything wrong with this. I know the majority of us are just coming off some corporate bullshit from reddit, but I don't think it's wrong to not let your very expensive to maintain service be used for free without ads.
I promise that I'm not trying to suck a billionaire's cock when I say that I marvel in awe at YouTube's ability to input and output such astronomical amount of data at any given time, without any complaints.
But this is such a shitty, hostile way to do it. And if you give in and say yes to ads they've already shown where that's going to go, with 10 unskippable ads in a row and 30 second ads.
They could make subscriptions mandatory if they really believe they have a good product, and pass a fat portion of that money to the creators instead.
...except this isn't about the creators, or the users, or the advertisers, it's about Google making more money at the expense of every single other party involved in the platform, and the platform be damned. Textbook late stage enshittification.
YouTube premium revenue is shared with creators based on view time. I don't know what percentage of the subscription cost is shared (I believe I've read 55% is shared but I didn't validate that right now, their help docs say "most" so it's likely over 50%). As I understand it from income breakdown from creators, income from YouTube premium does often surpass Adsense income even when only a small percentage of viewers use YouTube premium.
The larger factor in them doing this is that the value of selling ads has been decreasing substantially the last few years. This means they need to show more ads to make the same money they did before.
This is also part of why every YouTube creator now does their own sponsored ads inside videos, trying to rely only on Adsense isn't viable for them.
YouTube know they have a good product, and lots of people do subscribe to YouTube premium, there is no reason form them to force people onto YouTube premium when lots of people are willing to watch the ads.
I've had youtube premium for several years now. Most of the creators I watch do their best to integrate their sponsorships in an appropriate way. Whether that's choosing a sponsorship related to the video topic, or making it entertaining in its own right.
It's expensive to run servers that hosts tens of billions of videos. If you don't want to pay for access, then pay for no ads. If you don't want to pay for no ads, then watching the ads is the only way. Remember, if you're not buying the product, then you are the product.
Paying for YouTube premium still makes you the product, since you are still being tracked and sold. Hell you could drop over over 2k on a TV, phone, or GPU and still be getting tracked and sold. The old adage of if you aren't paying you are the product no longer applies. It's outdated.
Why is it a bad way to show a warning and still let you watch 3 videos for free?
Nah fuck that they have way too many unskipable 30 second ads for a 15min video. If it was 1 or 2 ads a video sure.
While I'm not opposed to paying for YouTube (it is a service after all) the only way to do so would be by being logged in to YouTube with whatever black box algorithmic tracking and curation that entails. There is no "proper" way to anonymously access YouTube without ads.
I know how obnoxious ads have become on the internet and I've seen how they have progressively gotten longer and more prevalent on YouTube but I don't really know how to feel about this. Conceptually, they are handling and storing so much video data their operating costs must be astronomical. As far as I know, advertisement is the main way they recoup any of that cost so I can't really blame them for this. Maybe they are just reaching a point where they are just too massive to work.
I would agree with you on this if it weren't for the fact that scam ads are so widespread on Youtube and Google that it's almost like they don't care about their users, only money. If they don't care about their users, why should I care about their bottom line. Also, ads I don't have too much of a problem with, but data collection and surveillance I do, and it's hard to block one without blocking the other.
People will choose the most convenient option. It just so happened that, for a brief period, it was more convenient to go through the hassle of installing an adblockers than to sit through the ads for regular users.
The unfortunate reality is that, for some people, moving over to TikTok will be more convenient than watching YouTube ads. Our attention span shrinks a little more, and Google takes one step closer to MySpace.
Youtube makes money from musicians, artists, creators, they wouldn't exist without them. Still, they only give back a small percentage of the profits to the creators. The exploitation fees are a fraction of the money they make. Anyway, lots of people turn off adblock on youtube, most people don't even know it's a thing. So I really dont believe a capitalist company like Google, that have always profit from creators are to pity.
Yeah, im not a fan of people trying to control what I do with my computing hardware. But in youtubes case, at least they pay the creators of monetized videos. I'll still figure out how to block the ads, but it's not like reddit.
YouTube once did a genius and really nice move: Paying the video authors. They realized that treating the people who create the works – that are the entire reason why people use the platform – well and creating an incentive for that work is smart and a good way to grow the platform.
But that time is long gone. YouTube is the monopoly in the market now. They ruin everything that was good about YouTube. They brought the adpocolypse and only pay video authors for videos the content of which they deem friendly to their advertisements business and easy to sell to advertisers based on a completely arbitrary broken automatic system that enforces self censorship on the video authors. All other videos that are still vital to the platform do not get any of the money they make of the viewers the demonetized videos keep on the platform.
They started putting ads on videos that the author did not choose to monetize completely breaking with their system of sharing their revenue with the people who create the basis for that.
While they impose strict arbitrary self censorship on the video authors who want a cut of the revenue their videos allowed to generate they allow a flood of scams and other illegitimate and inappropriate content for advertisers.
They removed the dislike button making the platform much worse for the users just to appeal to advertisers even more.
Yeah, I do think that they will start to try to lower the payments to creators as well, especially as high interest money flushes debt financed cash out of circulation.
Yeah, a part of me wants to immediately want to push back and hope to find better ad blockers for the site, but then I realized I've used YouTube for well over a decade now and all without watching any ads.
Honestly, it might be time for me to finally relent and just pay for premium.
Maybe they shouldnt handle and store so much data. I think peertube with a 720p upload limit would be about perfect
The funny thing is that I can't be bothered to install adblockers for mobile YouTube, despite that being 99% of my phone and YouTube usage. Video platforms are expensive AF, and I get it.
But man, that ad experience just keeps degrading. It really wears on me some days, making me seriously consider Premium.
But now that they are going to block adblockers outright? And especially now that they're paywalling the ability to queue videos in a dynamic playlist?? Something built into TV casting and the desktop app for free? Nah, Google can get fucked. It's ReVanced time.
YMusic is great Android app, too. It's mostly intended for being able to properly use your phone when you want to focus on the audio, i.e. you can freely disable the screen, browse other apps, set timers, tweak the built-in equalizer, that kinda stuff, but it is perfectly functional and complete video player for YouTube as well.
And it doesn't roll YouTube ads.
A lot of comments mentioning platforms like Nebula. I feel in this climate we should be continuing to encourage decentralized platforms. As lemmy is to reddit, peertube is to youtube. You can add a support button with links to any payment platforms you want; librapay is a nice one that takes 0% of donations as the platform itself runs on its own donations by a nonprofit.
I've heard nebula is run by the content creators themselves. That in and of itself is a very desirable property for a platform to have.
I can't seem to see why, enlighten me please
Isn't it obvious, Comrade? The workers have seized the means of production and publishing of content.
I can’t seem to figure out peertube. I’ve tried a few different platforms and made sure federation is turned on but I’m not seeing many videos over 1-3 views
Try tilvids.com. PeerTube doesn't have much content right now, and it's mostly videos with 1-3 views.
I’m not super opposed for paying for a product or service that I use, but the cost they are asking is just too expensive for me. Not that I can’t afford it, but for the 16/month or 23/month for family doesn’t meet my personal value/service.
Even if it were affordable, eventually it will go up. The subscribe-to-everything trend in business right now is pretty clear. Pretty soon we'll see subscription-based clothing.
Might as well already be there with the state and quality of fast fashion.
Yeah.
Not that it's a massive difference, but it's $11.99 if you sign up on the web. The $16 is if you sign up on an iPhone, since that has to go through Apple's subscription service where they take a cut.
Thank you, didn’t know that.
Weird it's $12 a month for me but nahh that's still too much
For mobile,and I believe pc, newpipe or libretube on fdroid,or their respective websites. Front ends for YouTube,ad free(libretube strips in video commercials too),and totally free. For fdroid tho,enable repositories and add https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/ . its the best way to watch YouTube,imo
Just buy from another country. I pay about £4 a month for mine via Romania
I pay $2.30 pm for a Family Plan via Turkey.
Mine comes out to about £1.40 a month using Turkey. It’s really low, but honestly that’s the amount that feels worth it to me.
Try revancedapp.
I'm sure there's a way to get around it, and if there isn't, then I just won't be using YouTube anymore. I survived before it existed. I'm getting tired of these companies' bullshit.
I'm truly surprised there hasn't been a successful YouTube competitor in the last decade or so.
I suspect the problem is that people wouldn't even pay a penny per video to content creators. From what I've seen of other competing video sites, there's a really serious moderation issue stopping them from wide adoption... So many of the competing sites are full of flat earth / anti-vax / pro-fascism content...
My understanding is that its just straight up not profitable plus network effect. Requires too many resources to run the service and only profitable if doing data harvesting from users in the way that google/etc do.
Exactly. I don't know if it's still the case, but AFAIK even YT has always operated at a loss. Google (or Alphabet) pays the difference from their other profits because YT offers other indirect value to them such as market share and potential future profits.
I expect tik tok to make a long form video tab and compete directly. The way that YouTube made shorts to compete with tik tok.
Running a video service the size of YouTube carries astronomical traffic and storage costs. Google is probably one of the only companies in the world that can stem that.
There's smaller video sharing sites, like DailyMotion, but those would probably instantly crash and burn if their userbase were to suddenly grow to the size of YouTube's.
It's because google has effectively unlimited resources and first-adopter advantage combined. The people who originally made youtube in 2005 would have never made money from it, even though the max upload quality was 240p (I remember when 480 on youtube was still considered high quality lol). But they got an audience which is what mattered. When google bought them, they still couldn't make money, but they could prevent ANYONE else making money with a similar product but throwing enough money and creator-focused policy around to make any other platform look just plain stupid. Even today, how much do you think it costs to store and serve the hundreds of thousands of videos uploaded to YT a DAY? Many of them at 4K res or even 4K60hz??? It's a massive undertaking and nobody can afford to build a competitor. And without youtube, the internet would be a much much smaller place.
I wonder how they will enforce this. If you can just open a private window to bypass it, it won't be very effective. Sure, they could do some fingerprinting, but I imagine avoiding false-positives would be very important, so I doubt they'd get very far with that.
Honestly, the only way I see is implementing a login wall, which I wouldn't put past them. And that's kinda scary. It would render so many links inaccessible to people without a Google account.
Or who knows, maybe they just want to make it more cumbersome and not completely prevent it, to get more people onto YouTube Premium, while the more determined people can continue adblocking because it's not worth fighting a small minority.
This is probably it. Google's in a cashflow crunch given the current economy and so they've been cutting benefits and boosting profits.
Why is it a bad way to show a warning and still let you watch 3 videos for free?
PeerTube's turn now :)
block scripts with uMatrix. a little finer grained. if they block me, oh well. still won't watch ads
Is Revanced going to be affected by this?
Depends how far they're going to take it. If they'll focus on people with a YouTube account and threaten to block their YouTube/Google account, it's one thing. You'll be able to work around it by using incognito mode (assuming you trust they don't spy on you in incognito mode...) or a browser where you're not logged in, or NewPipe etc.
If they threaten to block people who aren't logged in (by IP and by the fact they already spy on your phone and know your Google account) then it's another thing and nothing will be able to bypass it. They would burn a lot of bridges by doing that and expose themselves to some huge fallout and scrutiny about privacy, but you'd have no choice but to watch ads or not use YouTube.
well, hopefully their implementation has as many holes as everything else they do. with a custom rom you can even spoof free unlimited google photos, as if you're using a google pixel
Funny. They can try. I'm not as dependant on their platform as they wish-think. I'll find other ways or other platforms.
Nebula is a pretty decent paid platform with a lot of short form YouTube style content on it. Pretty sure its significantly better on privacy policy as well.
Without even reading their privacy policy, this much is pretty obvious. Nebula has a very simple, more traditional business model. You pay them money, they give you product. (Namely, streaming video.) Their business model doesn't include personal data in any way.
It's good to see more alternatives. Maybe I'll check out this one later
Good to know.
Give PeerTube more love.
I looked into it and seems like a real pain in the ass to set up
Wankers.
Dumb question, but will this also be affecting those on firefox or is this a chromium issue?
To put it bluntly it's a "wait 1-2 weeks for adblockers to update" issue.
Google has money, if they REALLY want they can put developers solely dedicated to the task of breaking youtube for people using adblockers.
This is a very bad sign.
I read somewhere it only affects Chrome users, but anyway, they're just testing it out on a small group of people for now.
Not paying youtube a cent until they remove all the transphobes and quit blasting people with their shit ass bigoted content. I'll pirate and ad block just to spite them every step of the way. Make your bed with fascists, lay in it.
Between reddit and YT forcing us out, we might have a chance to solving world hunger, less people doom consuming dumb content and actually doing stuff
Nah we're just gonna move all the dumb content to the fediverse!
Lemmy youtube when?
Right now the #1 alternative is Odysee. While Odysee itself is a centralized company its just as open sourced front end for the decentralized LBRY block chain.
As of now Odysee has far more videos, features, and download speeds then any other YouTube alternative.
If you're interested in supporting an alternative I reccomend downloading the "watch on odysee" extension which redirects YouTube videos that areavailible on Odysee, to Odysee. (Firefox) (Chrome)
Odysee is a right wing cesspool with no moderation: https://thelinuxexp.com/Im-leaving-odysee/
Just like YouTube is a left wing cesspool with cancel culture?
I guess you have to pick your poison.
Personally I can't think of a single traditional value worth preserving and I've got nothing worth conserving - given the pollution of the right that modern day corruption has completed, I'll stick to the lesser, at least until I can't dodge advertising anymore.
If you don't like it, then fork the and start your own curated version of Odysee. That's the beauty of federated software.
And while yes in its current state the userbase is pretty toxic; that's the price to pay when you have a platform with total free speech. The early adopters are always going to be the ones who rely on it the most (unsavory individuals). However this is no argument against free speech in the same way that criminals being the first ones to adopt privacy related projects, is no argument against privacy.
There's PeerTube I guess but all the videos are already on YouTube soo...
Considering how big and relevant YouTube is, I don't see it getting replaced by PeerTubr. The alternative at the moment are apps like ViewTube which is a custom front-end for YouTube that removes all the ads and tracking
Have we got any reps from ReVanced over here yet? It's not a federated or decentralised approach, but it at least removes the layer of scum enveloping YouTube.
I suggest NewPipe, I never tried ReVanced, but NewPipe probably has the same features if not more, i find it quite good
Remember the time when we used to search for and share funny ads? They could've done that, but no, they chose to make shitty ads that nobody wants to see.
I'm happy paying a Nebula subscription, (another video site started by a group of youtubers, mostly engineering/tech/documentary types) because I know that the creators are getting all my money after reasonable platform costs.
I won't consider paying for YT Premium (or Spotify) until they become a lot more generous to creators, and stop their insane copyright strike algorithm and banned-words audio scanner from demonetising and hiding random videos (Jake Broe, Joe Blogs, Denys Davydov, Ryan McBeth etc are always having to edit and reupload to cut some harmless snippet) and whole channels (Metatron) all the time.
You guys are really getting me into this Nebula thing, I watched videos from there before but I’ll try to use it more instead of YouTube and pay.
If I didn't get two back to back 30min videos from a politician running for election in the middle of a kids video I might have hesitated on the ad blocker, slightly. If you know who Clive Palmer is, it gives it more context.
Good ol Fatty McFuckhead!
For reference, he's an Australian billionaire who in my opinion, isn't great in character.
All that money spent and he didn't even get a seat.
If they break Piped and Invidious, I guess I'll have to only watch Nebula content.
I like newpipe on Android. Freetube looks similar. Can I import my newpipe data to freetube and vice versa?
Yes you can :-)
Newpipe for Android and use Freetube for my PC. Both have been go to apps for me for years now.
Unsure, but I was able to port my data over to Libretube from Newpipe.
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone mention Odysee yet
I signed up to Odysee the other day to upload a video. It was too hard and I gave up.
You need to be confirmed to upload. Their options were:
Nope nope nope. Made an account on Vimeo and uploaded there instead. Everything worked.
Maybe I'm just not the target audience? Bigger barriers to entry might only let the more profitable people pass? Not sure.
Holy shit that's actually removed. Good luck to them it's probably the first and last time I'll hear of them.
It's what now?
Odysee is a right wing cesspool with no moderation and crypto is a complete scam at this point. https://thelinuxexp.com/Im-leaving-odysee/
I've been on Odysee for a while and immediately signed up for premium. Happy to give my money to not-youtube. Unfortunately, there aren't many of my favourite creators on there yet, so I still have to return to YT for some things.
mpv is not a crime!
another reminder to everyone else that invidious exists
They got contacted by YouTube legal team around the same time experiment news came out.
I’ve already migrated from Twitter to Mastodon, Reddit to Lemmy, looks like I’ll have to test disabling my traffic to YouTube. I control what content reaches my eyes on my devices, not Google. That is a hard line for me.
Might as well go Youtube to PeerTube
google, loke reddit, still makes a shitton of money with adblockers on. everybody is a fucking vulture these days.
I may test stoppig to use youtube if they wanna me to see their 4956 ads for video based on high profilation
I'm thinking about recording my screen monitor while I'm playing some video games and upload the videos both on PeerTube and on YouTube. With a slightly little difference between them: the YouTube version will show messages encouraging the use of adblockers and leading people to PeerTube.
Now I have to find a good software and configuration to record my gameplays on my "potato" computer.
Might I recommend simple screen recorder? Its what I use and it works great!
I was doing experiments with ffmpeg. If it works well, good. If not, I'll try simple screen recorder. Thanks.
I use OBS for screen recording. While it's not necessarily "simple", once it's set up I usually just fire it up and hit a hotkey to start recording whatever game is running. And I get a lot more control of the result. And there are tons of plugins and support for it out there as it is popular with streamers.
The beginning of the Youtube exodus. People use Youtube for convenience, but what if you have to wait for 2 min to watch your 10 min video?
Exodus where? Most creators are only on YouTube and it's not like there's really an alternative.
A lot are also on alternative platforms like nebula. It's true that it's only a select few, but they tend to be also the most interesting YouTube channels.
To nowhere. It may take some time getting used to not watching my favorite content creators, but I think I'll manage just fine. I'd rather not use youtube-ish sites at all instead of being forced to watch ads every few minutes.
Don't know who your favorite creators are, but many of my favorite creators are on nebula, so at least thats a start.
With ublock theres no issues?
Looks like I might test disabling Youtube from my life then
@Tetra I wonder if YouTube's fight with ad blockers will convince more people to take a look at peertube and lbry
@DeadNinja
Sadly unlikely. People don't come to youtube because they like youtube. People come to youtube because the content they want is on youtube, and the content creators surely don't mind the ads, so that content will remain on youtube.
A number -- not all -- of the content creators are creating content to be paid by YouTube, so the ads or some kind of consumer payment or something is kind of intrinsic to the system for those.
No it will not. Unfortunately there is no alternative to Youtube.
Look into "revanced" on mobile, it works great, no ads, sponsor block, lots of customization.
Wow, thanks, YouTube! I always had such a hard time disabling my ad blocker - I'm so glad you've made it easier for me!
Really, though, I don't see this ending well for YouTube. I'd bet there'll be an ad blocking option that works to bypass this within a week.
It's the sheer patrimony of statements like these that really annoy me. I get that things have costs and they also have to deliver a profit; that's just business. But why can't they just have the guts to openly say that rather than dress it up in all the bullshit
Within a week? I think my ad blocker already handles it; I haven’t noticed ads on YouTube ever, on my own devices, and haven’t seen their latest messaging either.
Maybe an unpopular opinion here… but checking my stats, since buying YouTube premium my account has watched over 50 days worth of ad free video content.
Now whilst I wish more of money went to the creators themselves, I can’t pretend I don’t get value out of the subscription. Especially compared to something like Netflix.
I have 6 subscriptions and YouTube is the last one I’d consider cancelling.
I think there's a moral issue in giving youtube money.
I'd love to hear your view. I haven't really considered it.
They are already harvesting all our data, so it's not like they aren't getting anything out of us. And it's not like paying them opts users out of being tracked either. So what exactly is the benefit to paying a data harvesting company that isn't going to stop, and users are what provides them that info they need in the first place. Including their attempts at AI search that will rely on users to train it.
I prefer to do ublock origin/sponsorblock + patreon. Gives the creators a bigger cut and I still don't see ads. I'm currently at $15/mo across all creators but judging by Louis Rossmann's video on lifetime ad revenue per user it doesn't seem hard to offset any loss from ad blocking (iirc he said it was like <$1 of ad revenue for your lifetime of watching a creator). So I feel pretty good about giving most of the channels I watch casually $1/mo, especially when patreon's cut is so much smaller than youtube premium's.
How have you seen more than 0 minutes of ads? Ublock blocks them
I have ublock on my desktop but for me with a wife and kids who who have their own devices, the TVs in the house etc, the convenience of never getting ads on any device is really good.
And for me personally I don’t mind paying if I get value in return, and I do.
I use Blokada and Newpipe on Android and never get an ad.
I bought premium just so my wife and me can listen to music while commuting. Not having to rely on ublock origin (which I still have on my desktop at home) is a nice extra, but mobile was my main concern. I'd like to keep the usage of tools like Vanced at a minimum. They could stop working on the one day when I'm stuck in a train for hours.
That's more a benefit for them than you though. I think people are more asking what's the benefit for users with the know how and willingness to implement what features they want for themselves.
He said he watches YT on his Smart TVs. You cannot install Brave on those devices.
I signed up via Turkish VPN and the TRY currency has only dropped since, 60 TRY is only $2.30 pm for a Family Plan.
I'm the same, and I actually like YouTube Music app too, prefer it over Spotify.
Agree that I would prefer their business practices to be more supportive of content creators.
Conversations around YT on the internet always blows my mind. People are so adamant that they deserve an ad free, subscription free service from YT. I'm with you, personally. I've had premium for years and I've cancelled many other subscriptions in that time and premium is the absolute last one I'll cancel. Works for my whole fam, includes yt music, I watch or listen to YT content literally hours every day, for years. The value is a no brainer for me.
I do wonder how the subs get split. Like is it just a bonus based on general stats or stats of users paying?
For me I use the phone app and on a TV so not having to setup extra ad blocking nonsense is nice. I also watch it all the time and do want to support people making content. I've done the Patreon thing some and tried to bounce around who I was giving a few dollars to. More convenient if the YouTube sub just benefits the people I'm watching.
My understanding is that for free users watching your content you get a percentage of the ad revenue. But views from premium subscribers earns you a flat rate not dependant on advertisements, and that flat rate is higher than what you’d get from an ad supported view.
The general consensus is YouTube is still greedy with the split , but at least they are offering more from a premium view.
The real question is if creators still need to do that dystopian self-censorship to avoid being demonetized on the subscription money even though there are no advertisers who mandate advertiser-friendly language or content.
Do you want to drive people to Peertube? Because this is how you can do it.
I used the frequent YouTube but watch less and less as their ads become more invasive and unskippable.
EDIT
Not sure why unskippable to was autocorrected to unstoppable.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear...
Yeah that ain't gonna do it for me.
I already mostly use YouTube's mobile site in Firefox on Android with plugins to make the experience manageable. If they break that then I'm going to go crazy.
YouTube is worse everyday it passes.
Any good alternatives out there?
Smells a little like enshittification in here.
What pisses me off is when I have some appliance or vehicle malfunction and it bombards me with ads when there's an emergency and trying to find information quickly on mobile. It's especially annoying when that information doesn't exist anywhere else on the internet.
They apparently sell a premium service without ads for $12/month.
https://www.youtube.com/premium
I'd be interested to know whether they data-mine premium account activity. If yes, then they have a link to payment information and thus personal identity to link whatever they're data-mining to. If no, if you can buy privacy, that might be interesting.
Good. Ad-blocking is piracy. Those content creators you are watching are depending on the revenue from ads. Either watch ads or buy premium. Third option? Don't watch youtube.
I had no idea people like you actually exist
Most people don't have a problem with ads.
People have a problem when the ads are so intrusive and prevalent they get in the way of the actual content. People have a problem with ad networks acting like obsessed stalkers -- building incredibly detailed profiles of them as a person and selling that information to others.
Nope sorry, Youtube gets punished for bad ad practices. You don't get to pretend that the content creator is the victim of the ad-blocking user when YT controls the platform.
Content creators on YouTube get almost nothing from ad revenue, they mostly rely on sponsorships.
Lmao yes they do. Literally Google any content creators revenue. Most don't even have sponsors. Keep lying to yourself. Just know that you're stealing from them
Then I will gladly keep on stealing. Arr! 🏴☠️
It's a shame downvotes are turned off.
I'm very sympathetic to this viewpoint. If anything, I actually think adblocking is worse than conventional piracy (though nowhere near as bad as actual theft), because with piracy you're costing the creator nothing and getting their stuff for free. With adblocking you're getting it free and costing them the fees for bandwidth. It's a tiny fee on a per-user basis, but it's real. Not as bad as actual theft though because you're not depriving them of the ability to sell what they created to someone else.
My problem with YouTube in particular is that they're just so damn shitty to the people that provide them value. Like Reddit, but not quite as extreme. For years YouTube has been slow to act to demonetise actual bad actors, while good actors constantly get caught up with bullshit abuses of their Content ID (with public domain content being detected, and fair use exemptions to use of copyrighted material being ignored). And more recently, with their demonetisation of marginalised creators simply for talking about their own lived experience.
I used to pay for YouTube Red back when it existed, happily. But for me the last straw came in 2018 when they started screwing over small-time creators by removing longstanding small creators from the partner programme as a lazy overreaction to a few not-longstanding bad actors.
These days, I watch as many creators as I can on Nebula, which I happily pay for, and would have happily paid for a lifetime membership of, if that offer had been available for just 1 week longer than it actually was, despite objectively the lifetime membership probably not being a good deal for the individual user. I'm happy to pay for a good experience, but not for a company that screws over its suppliers so badly.
Every single YouTuber makes the majority of their revenue off of memberships, sponsorships and merch.
Not watching YouTube and ad blockers are almost the same option as far as YouTube and creators are concerned, except Google loses a fraction of a scent in bandwidth and the the creator doesn't get the view counts or engagement.