this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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Mildly Infuriating
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Imagine thinking a platform wanting you to pay for the service they provide is "bullying".
Christ you people are off the deep end.
You mean the content they provide made by creators who only make a living through Patreon and donations?
What absolute nonsense, over half of YouTube's ad revenue goes to creators. The site itself is also phenomenally expensive to run.
I don't care what it costs to run YouTube. All I hear from the creators is "Support us on Patreon because YouTube doesn't pay" and they sure ain't asking us to buy YouTube premium.
I have literally seen 2 creators ever bring up youtube red, saying that yes subscribers do make up a more significant percentage of their revenue and did help a little bit when videos got demonetized. Every creator is saying some sort of the "I don't want all my eggs in one basket, I can't trust these platforms" argument.
Honestly, I agree with you with that. YouTube pays creators a lot, technically we shouldn't be removed about the presence ads, because it's how they stay afloat, that's just how it works. My main issue is the sheer amount of them nowadays. I used to gladly watch the ads, but it went from one or two before and after each video, to heaps of midrolls every couple minutes. It's not the ads that annoy me, it's the amount of them, which is the reason I use an ad blocker (which tbh applies to most of the Internet nowadays)
Even if YT gave all the money to the creators, ads are so cheap nowadays that it would need them approx 20.000 ad views just to pay a month of premium (and that's assuming every cent goes to them) big creators and publishers sure make money out of ads, in the end they get millions of views. But a smaller creator thst works hours upon hours on a video is making probs less than minimum wage through ads. Ergo If they want to make money they need to rely on generous people.
Google ran Youtube at a loss for years to draw everyone in and now that there's no real competition (yet), are tightening the screws. Very similar to how Walmart will sell stuff at a loss to bankrupt locally owned stores and then raise their prices.
Exploitive megacorporation can pound sand. It wasn't a bad experience back when it was a single short ad before every video. Now I've had a wonderful ad free experience for years because of ad blockers. Why would I downgrade the experience and pay for it?
You can pay for things you want. That's fine.
Google is attempting to remove the freedom of viewing HTML the way I want to view it from my own devices. While they're free to run their website the way they want to, the principle of attempting to remove your freedom of choice is not only a bad look, but violating.
These two things are different, and one does not negate the validity of the other.
I am sorry but that argument simply doesn’t make an awful lot of sense to me. Unless I am missing a facet, you are saying that your autonomy outstrips their rights? If we were to make an analogue version of that argument would your autonomy to use your hands how you see fit, allow for you to walk into a shop and take something without paying? It seems like, unless I’ve missed something, that’s the analogy.
Commerce and indeed society has always been a balance of personal autonomy and rules, with YouTube you’re going to a website and circumventing their chosen rules. I might not agree with YouTube’s methods, but I don’t think I can get behind the argument they are impinging on your technical rights any more than Tesco does if you try to half-inch a chocolate bar.
You're getting my two points mixed up.
For my first point, paying, let's say you subscribe to a newspaper. You pay a monthly fee, and the newspaper comes to your house. Nothing special.
For the second point, let's say you have a free, ad-supported magazine. Once you obtain the magazine, how you read it and what you do with it is up to you. If you want to go as far as to cut the ads out before you read it, you can do that. And you should be able to do that if you want to, because the magazine is in the privacy of your home.
Ad-supported websites are no different whatsoever. The web server gives you HTML, JavaScript, some media, and together, it suggests a way for your browser to render the page. When you download the assets, you've acquired the "free magazine," and your personal browser, in the privacy of your home on your own machine, decides how it should be displayed.
Imagine if there was a way for the ad-supported magazine to attempt to force you into spending 10 seconds on each page with ads. This sounds silly, but this is what Google is attempting to do. HTTP responses are nothing but simple chunks of data. You can use telnet to retrieve it without a browser, if you wanted. It's simply a virtual analog to pages in a magazine.
That’s a great analogy and helps me understand your argument much better. There is something I think you’ve missed though, which is that advertisers pay to be in the publication, and they pay at the point the print occurs. Rendering in your browser is the analog to hitting the print button, not putting it on a server to be pulled down. In your analogy, the advertiser has paid already before you consume the magazine; but for YouTube the advertisers don’t pay as their adverts are never compiled into the magazine. If you want to write a browser that still calls the ads api and plays the video in the background so YouTube gets the ad revenue but you have “cut it out” then I don’t imagine google would care half as much.
This is true. It does still line up with the freedom of consuming content the way you want on your personal browser, however.
Imagine playing a browser yourself. You use telnet to download the HTML for a video. You inspect it, and find that there is a JavaScript asset in the HTML. You make a GET request to fetch it. A dozen requests later, there is a link to an ad.
What do you do now? Are you obligated to submit a GET request to it? Do you not have a right to choose to skip it? Earlier, in telnet, you skipped downloading thumbnails that you didn't care about, so how is this any different? Shouldn't you be able to choose this? Say you didn't have freedom, and you actually were obligated to type out a GET request to fetch the ad. After the ad has been downloaded, you are technically consuming the content offline in a cache. Now what?
Are you obligated to view it? It's a stream of data. You could inspect the content in a hex editor as a way of viewing it, but it's that enough? Did you actually consume it? Are you forced to use a functional media player on your personal device to play the ad? How much of the ad are you forced to watch? What difference does it make at this point, since you've obtained the data, and you're left to your own devices? Shouldn't you have the freedom to do what you want?
If YouTube does some ad payout stuff behind the scenes, server-side, then that's server-side, and it isn't any of your business. It's the same as their data collection, sharing with third parties, building a profile on you, tracking hit counters, etc. In fact, they spend a lot of effort ensuring that it doesn't become anyone's business but their own. Just because the asset is an ad versus a JavaScript asset you also didn't care about doesn't matter. You have the freedom to consume the content that's given to you in the privacy of your own home.
You could liken ads to free physical mailing list forms in the free magazine. Just because you obtained the magazine and the publisher makes money off you signing up for junk mail doesn't mean you're obligated to do it. You are given the option to request more media, and you are not forced to make any effort to cut it out of the magazine, fill it out, and mail it in. You're also not obligated to read any amount of the junk mail that you receive as a result of the form. This is your choice, and you should be able to flip to the next page instead, which is equal to not being obligated to type GET requests by hand in a telnet console, which is equal to choosing not to make the requests in your browser.
Well the creators I like don't see it as a good relationship. They keep leaving for Twitch, Patreon, Nebula, or quitting on content creation. If I'm a fan of them, I need to listen to their concerns about how YouTube is constantly threatening their livelihood.
"Create the problem, sell the solution."
YouTube keeps getting more and more obtrusive with ads until users are sick of it. Annoying me into paying you is not going to work.
The bully part comes in when YouTube music is rolled into the cost. I would pay for youtube premium if all I got was a premium YouTube (and therefore the price was substantially lower). But what they're doing is leveraging the popularity of YouTube to try and force the bolstering of YouTube music subscribers. Furthermore, they are currently increasing the price for premium in several markets. So the already too high cost is temporary at best and nearly guaranteed to go up even further with absolutely no increase in benefits. Paying to remove ads seems fine, but what they are attempting to do goes beyond that simple quid pro quo. They are being coercive and indirect to a degree I find unethical. Thus, bully.
I've imagined this as per your instructions. I don't understand the point of this exercise.
I understand that they need the money to host the videos, but I won't directly pay them considering how they treat viewers and creators. I'm pretty sure they would be $100+ richer from me if they didn't remove the dislike count.
I haven’t used YouTube logged in since they force merged YouTube accounts with Google accounts. This make me a bit harder to track and my data slightly less valuable. I don’t like that my data will still being used to create an advertising profile even if I pay. If one of the features of YouTube premium was they would never sell any of my data across all Google services then I would be willing to pay for it.