I just got my first 30 second UNSKIPPABLE ad on my TV the other day…I closed youtube, as watching a 1min video is NOT worth 30 seconds of ads
I recommend you to sideload SmartTube on your TV, *if it has an Android-based OS. It works better than the official app in my opinion, and includes SponsorBlock.
*Edit
Will do, thanks!
I wish this was available on WebOS. I use it on my Shield and it’s been flawless.
Are Android smart TVs that popular nowadays? I mean few years ago I wouldn’t assume Android TV when hearing about smart TVs
Good point. I must confess that I haven’t actualized my knowledge of smart TVs in a long time, so, specifying that the recommendation concerns only TVs with an Android based OS would be a good idea.
Probably depends on the country, but very popular.
Even Google Chromecast run AndroidTV these days.
There is something fundamentally wrong with a service that shows more ads than content.
and this is why you should use third party clients/patches like revanced
Ehh. I wouldn’t suggest someone go use any old patched client. Do your due diligence and be safe.
Hard to believe people down voted this. I’m just saying make sure you get stuff from official sources like https://ReVanced.app
No. This is why if you like a service, you pay for it.
Personally I don’t want to pay Google out of principle tbh, the creators I support can benefit from my Patreon donations and Nebula subscription
That’s way too expensive and I can’t afford it. YTP is less than $4 a month so at least the creators gets at least a few cents from my views, and I watch a lot of creators.
Where the hell are you paying less than $4 a month? It’s $14 here in America. Even with a student discount, it’s still twice the price you’re quoting.
Malaysia. It’s RM 17.90 which roughly converts to $3.94.
I find this take wierd. If you do not want to support Google, stop using services created by them.
The content creators can upload videos to multiple platforms if they want to
I’ll gladly pay for a service that doesn’t thrive on pushing propaganda down people’s throats to maximize watch time and that isn’t actively trying to make my user experience miserable by removing downvotes, forcing shorts and so on.
I’d rather pay someone to kick me in the nuts. Sounds like a better deal tbh.
Oh nooo, who will think of the big tech who continue to get record profits every year?
I want creators to get paid when I watch them but I also don’t want ads. YT Premium is affordable (it costs less than $4 a month for me) for me and I also get YT Music with it. I watch hundreds of hours worth of video from multiple creators so it’s a fair deal.
Woah dude that’s crazy. Anyways, I’m still going to AdBlock them and pirate yt music. Big tech can suck my
Quit bragging and start sharing that code you’re using for $4/month YT Premium that the rest of us have to pay $13.99 after last month’s price hike.
I support the sentiment, but today everything is a service that wants your money, this resource is finite. And when it comes to YouTube, it’s not even about whether you like it or not: YouTube is a monopolist.
But I hate the service, it’s the only service around though.
There’s a reason why they are the only ones. It’s very hard to scale a platform to YouTube scale. Like insanely hard and very expensive. The only other players that could take over are Meta and maybe Microsoft. Not sure if they would be any better.
I’ve been thinking that pornhub might make a good competition if they made a safe for work version.
You hear that Texas?
There’s others that are at that scale. Amazon, Valve, battle.net, Netflix, pornhub, CloudFlare, to name a few.
lol you hate the service so it makes it ok for you to steal? K good sirs, keep on pirating
Is pirating stealing? Nothing was taken from YouTube. You could say it’s unauthorized access, or unauthorized duplication of data, but none of that leaves YouTube down any data.
In their defense, it costs bandwidth to Google.
In my attack, fuck Google. Costing them money is a good thing. They are literally trying to lock down corporate control over the Internet.
Right. It really pains me to see how many people simply buy into nonsensical corporate propaganda. This is a matter of our freedom and our democracy, and every single day that the mega-corporations are expanding their hold of our information retrieval and processing, we get one step closer to not being able to control what’s happening to us anymore, to tell reality apart from deception, to innovate, to build our own futures. 1984 is such a good piece of literature because it is shocking, but I find it even more shocking that we are accelerating ever more into such a future.
if google made youtube premium like $3/month no one would bat an eye and sub. but they’re approaching netflix prices and that’s just way to much. i rather support the creators directly than throwing money at google who will give the creators crumbs until they demonetize them because google is doing google things. also won’t solve the privacy problem that comes with using their native site/apps.
In some places they are more expensive than Netflix…
I think part of the problem is that they’re hosting so much more content than Netflix. It really is crazy that it’s free to upload to YouTube to just store all your videos on there. Probably 99.9% of YouTube content does not get enough views to justify the cost of storing it.
All that being said, YouTube premium comes with a bunch of shit nobody wants so surely they could cut that stuff to lower the price (or tiered pricing for people who want it).
No. This is why if a service loses sight of its core value proposition, it dies.
If youtube is actually successful in killing adblocking on their service - which I suppose a server-side timer could actually do - then they will only succeed in killing their relevance, just like so many social media seem to be doing right now.
I pay for services like a debrid and VPN, because they provide me with the services I need. For very few dollars a month I can get 4K streaming from their servers 24/7. That is all hosting should cost. If the fediverse version of youtube, peertube, became mainstream then collectively people should have absolutely no problem maintaining those costs from the users’ side.
Once that happens and mainstream video streaming is part of the fediverse, I think the network effect that governs social media might snowball until eventualy centralised social media is a thing of the past.
Do not pay for youtube, whatever you do. Let them die.
lol this post is nothing more than a tantrum from a leech of a service they’re too cheap to pay for and scrabbling for reasons other than said cheap-ness
you may get likes on the internet for this wholly selfish take but we all know it’s nothing more than that.
It’s just devastating when you invent unwholesome motivations for my words to attack as an alternative to attacking the ideas themselves.
My ego is in tatters.
You think too much of the average person. This sort of thing might affect you, but it won’t affect your friend’s 8 year old brother or his parents who just want a convenient way to watch pewdiepie
Perhaps, but you can only crush so much blood from a stone and the masses are slowly becoming destitute.
Social networks don’t succeed or fail on casual viewers alone. Youtube is a video sharing site, not a content producer. If they get so toxic that the content producers start finding alternatives, then the casual viewers won’t all leave right away.
If it gets so bad that big creators, like pewdiepie, have alternatives that grow in relevance and youtube loses its critical market share then it will eventually lose the casual viewers too, especially if those alternatives aren’t up to their eyeballs in ads.
We saw this with digg losing its place to reddit, where they sold out their content to publishers. Content got thinner and worse until the vast majority of users left for reddit.
This may not be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. For reddit it was the API lockdown, for twitter it’s… well I could point to any number of individual decisions but let’s just call them Elon Musk. Facebook hasn’t quite hit that tipping point yet I don’t think.
With youtube I can easily see this being part of a string of decisions to promote publisher content over user content. They’re already selling views which could really sink them in the end.
Speaking of suicide, Tumblr found out that most of its content was porn and most people were coming for it when it banned it
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/CtUuab1Aqg0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
“Soon we will have a new web. One far younger and far more powerful.”
You do realize the average person watches YouTube on their TV or their phone, with ads? You are not the target audience for Google.
So I fully expect YouTube to kill adblocking at some point and they might lose what? 10% of users? Of which 5% either come back to watch ads or pay the subscription because all the content is on there?
I’m 100% pro adblocker, the internet is a mess without, but it’s stupid to think YouTube wouldn’t cut you off the moment you don’t provide any benefit to their service (For example despite adblocking you might give Superchat money to streamers, or join Streamer memberships).
Audience is only part of the equation, arguably not the largest part. How many content creators use adblock? The big ones already know how completely meaningless ad revenue is because youtube doesn’t pay them enough and they are already aware of how easy it is to block ads. Also they’re more likely to be using youtube on a desktop because they use one to create, and they also are more aware of the alternatives like revanced. A lot of big creators have spoken out over the years in favour of adblocking.
If youtube makes it impossible for creators to use their own platform they’ll leave in droves, and they will have the voice to encourage their audience to follow. Youtube isn’t the main voice on their own site, the creators are.
Another thing this will impact is the ability for creators to collaborate, since they would have to watch others’ ads in order to see their videos.
Once that happens, the audience will naturally follow. That’s how social media sites have failed in the past. They’ve pissed off the power users to the point they finally left, then the content declined, then users followed.
Youtube is making the same mistake all capitalist entities do, of mistreating the people who actually make the product they’re selling. It’s a fundamental contradiction that only leads to decline in the end, it’s just a matter of when. This may not be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, if this isn’t it, then something down the line will be.
Dude, it’s at most 20 bucks a month to get rid of all ads (with YouTube music on top). Any creator who has some following can pay that from pocket change. The big content creators (1M+ subscribers) pull in millions with a mix of ad money and sponsorships. And it would be a business expense on top for them…
Creators are the last person to actually care about YouTube forced ads, it’s their job, they can afford it easily.
The only ones really impacted are power users, people who use adblock right now to watch. Which would also include me. But what do you want to do? There is no other platform, if they block adblockers I either have to watch ads or finally pay them money. I’m not going to leave for another platform because there is none. Twitch is there, sure, but it’s only for livestreams and awful for VODs.
$20/mo would have kept me fed for the better part of a month a couple years ago. Money has almost never not been tight, often to the point of being inhumane.
If they start forcing ads, I’ll just do what I used to do when I didn’t have home internet and start downloading videos instead. Which is nicer to be able to hold onto anyway. If someone doesn’t like me “stealing,” they can fucking pay me.
Not sure what kind of shit take that is if you bought a $70 game recently (Baldur’s Gate 3, even I’m waiting for a sale and money is not tight for me), you have cats and probably a Nintendo Switch with Zelda, that’s just what I read on the first page of your profile. So you obviously have money to spend on entertainment, like most adults.
$20 is clearly too much just to get rid of ads (though it also gets you YouTube Music, like Spotify), but I was talking about content creators who can easily afford this. And most people spend hours on YouTube, probably more time than they use Netflix if we’re being honest.
I don’t like Google either, but at some point they need to make money. That’s the simple truth. If everyone used adblockers we’d see a lot more content locked down behind a paywall. It is what it is. Then you either pay or you find some other source of content.
And let’s be real, people pay for entertainment. If I go outside and throw a stone it would probably hit someone with a Netflix/HBO/Disney+/Spotify/Prime or whatever subscription. It’s difficult to find a person who doesn’t have Netflix for example. If Google forces this through YouTube will just be another subscription service (or you get ads). Or they start limiting uploads to save on cost, which would actually kill their platform (as probably 99% of uploaded videos are barely or never watched, around one hour of video per second is getting uploaded right now).
Youtube constantly screws over and underpays the people who create all of the content that makes their site possible whilst also demanding they pay for a service that is worse than what adblockers already offer whilst also running a business that relies solely on critical mass of users rather than any actual value that youtube themselves can uniquely provide. That could never backfire.
demanding they pay for a service that is worse than what adblockers already offer
Or you could say they have tolerated adblockers until now and allowed you to use their service without a paywall. Yes, it sucks, we’re used to blocking ads, but it was like having free lunch.
whilst also running a business that relies solely on critical mass of users rather than any actual value that youtube themselves can uniquely provide
There have been plenty of other platforms who tried to do what YouTube did, they all failed. YouTube provides a massive infrastructure, about one hour of video is getting uploaded to their servers every second. And it must be kept around, so the amount of data only goes up. A total nobody can upload a 100 hours of video and YouTube will gladly accept that and still make those videos available 5 years from now.
To say they don’t provide a relatively unique (or at least very difficult) service is insanity.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/4Q3ZXQZZlcE
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Google has been shamelessly destroying all their projects the last few years in a desperate fit to make money. They’ve weakened ad blockers on chrome, they’ve altered the search algorithm so random BS is mixed in with regular to drive towards sponsored content, their starting to setup browser level DRM and creating un skipable ads. None of this is for anything more than greed and desperation. They no longer see anything other than money as the end goal and don’t care if their selling a shittier product at a higher price than no one was ever even willing to pay for. F*ck google.
YT Premium costs less than $4 for me and I also get YT Music. It sure beats paying $4 for only a music service.
Until its no longer profitable like the hundreds of other BS google tricks you into supporting only to ditch later https://killedbygoogle.com/ . Also in what world are you paying under $4 the standard package today is $13.99
I’ll stop paying when it stops working. Also regional pricing. I pay around $3.9 for Premium + Music.
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Because somehow paying $4 a month is unreasonable for a service that I use for 2-4 hours every day.
Right.
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And that’s how things die due to no revenue. Running YouTube is expensive af and the more people who used things like revanced, the worse things will become for everyone else.
It’s funny how you put all the blame on the users and none on the people that run the site. They fail to pay creators properly, fail to protect them from copyright claim abuse, and all the while they expect those creators to keep making content to keep their site relevant. It’s going to come crashing down eventually.
Also, in matters of taste the customer is always right. If people are so fed up with ads that they adblock en masse and/or leave, then youtube are the only ones to blame.
My point in my comment was about how YouTube is expensive to run and that the more people who refuse to generate revenue for it (I feel dirty writing that and strongly disagree with it, by my feelings have no effect on reality,) then it has to make shittier and shittier decisions to generate that revenue.
I 100% agree that YouTube should pay their creators more and protect them from bullshit copyright, but that would just compound the issue of the cost of running the site.
What is this entitled attitude everyone has where they believe they should be handed things for free? It completely unsustainable and childish. Corporations do not do things for free, they can’t. They exist solely to generate revenue and if they can’t, they die. I generally hate corporations on principle, but again my feelings don’t change reality.
Nobody is saying they should be handed things for free, we are saying that youtube is doing a bad job and shouldn’t be enabled.
Piracy is not a moral problem, it is a service problem. They are making their service worse with their decisions, and if it’s not sustainable long term then it will die, which I believe is inevitable at this point.
Again, this isn’t about individual behaviour, it is about mass behaviour. None of us can control that. If youtube wants to succeed, they have to navigate the reality that adblocking will happen on their service, and I don’t believe they can do that. It’s not that it would be physically impossible, they just lack the capacity to find a solution because of how they are structured. The problem is that they will not accept a lower bottom line, they have to keep increasing revenue so they are squeezing people, and eventually they will go too far. Once they get just a little bit too close to the sun they will start their death spiral and then they’re done.
Federated networks prove that we don’t need some central overlord to run our networks for us, and once there is a way to own our own video sharing network I would have absolutely no problem giving some money to support it. I’m not going to give money to a big corporation to enable them to keep squeezing us. They don’t make a good service, they make a shitty, awful service that we have to fight them in order to use properly. The only substantial thing they’re doing is server hosting, and we don’t need them to do that. The only real barrier is critical mass of users and creators, and eventually they’re going to push enough people away that that happens.
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You’ll care as more and more people have to quit YouTube or make progressively more shit content to appease the algorithm. It also makes it harder and harder for new people to start on YouTube.
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Maybe they shouldn’t operate in the first place if they cannot think of a sustainable business model without f*ing their users up.
Basically everything within capitalism fucks over someone that’s just business as usual 8n out society. Usually to a much worse degree, think the children who likely made your clothes for next to nothing. I’m all for tearing down the system, but there’s not a whole lot as an individual that I can do.
I’m a premium user so I’m not affected (for now)
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Good thing I don’t like youtube.
I meant that if you use YouTube a lot, it would be fair to pay for an ad-free experience.
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Like Cable Television, right?
I use SponsorBlock.
And you realize that YouTube will do everything in their hands to stop you from using these apps in the future right? That was kinda the point of the article.
Making people pay (with their time and attention) while they are already paying for subscription will not encourage more people to buy premium.
i was a YT premium subscriber when google play music didn’t suck… they lost me when they switched it to youtube music
What changed after the switch? I kept subscribing since the music + YouTube video was well worth the value for me, and haven’t noticed a change.
They kept trying to push videos into my feed. I want a music service period
Also it was sometimes hard to tell if i’m listening to official content from the band, or some bootleg copy uploaded by user “SomeGuy83771”
There were a bunch of other annoyances that i cant really remember off the top of my head right now… Its beeb many years since i left
No more gapless playback for one. Listening to albums by e.g. Pink Floyd can be really annoying without it…
Ah YouTube, the site where I watch a video that tells me in ten minutes what I could read in one. And only 5 advertisements!
Oops, six. I forgot the ad the creator slipped in between minute 1 and 2.
Recommend hitting ‘4’ (40%) straight away on how to videos, its usually the start of showing you how to do the thing.
The Wadsworth constant
You might want to follow other people, my friend
No, they have a point. Because you earn money by views, people now make videos about everything instead of writing something somewhere that can be found by search engine. Video has its uses but it’s far overused nowadays and it sucks.
That’s why I use YouTubetranscript now to read through the video to see if it is even worth watching, since so much stuff is unnecessarily long due to how algorithms push those videos to the top.
Ctrl+F’ing my way through the transcript of a 38min crafting video to see when they’re ever actually going to do the thing they made the video about, if they ever get around to it at all.
Somehow, more than once, the answer was no.
I used SponsorBlock for a while and it worked pretty well. It crowdsources where the ads are in a video and you can choose to skip them automatically.
I would like to use this opportunity to make more people aware of YouTubetranscript.
Sites been a huge time saver just reading through the video instead of sitting through 10 minute long videos that turn out to be a waste of time that could have been said in a couple minutes.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=0oHoXlnv-RE
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
So I’m sure u wont have a problem avoiding it therefore this doesnt concern you
How can you possibly forget the mid-video ad read that is actually a part of the video, thus unblockable?
It’s like how they expect you to pay for things at a store now too! Like “I just wanted some milk dude!”
“Modern problems require modern solutions” -> get sponsorblock
I mean, if it is an ad that actually directly gets the video creator paid, I’m not even mad about those, especially when it’s quality content. Not a fan of those who just take common searches for questions online and create a long video to explain the answer when it should have just stayed as a stackoverflow question and answer or something.
+1 to InternetHistorian’s ads, the only channel where I purposely don’t skip over the ads even if I know I’m never gonna actually get said product
Next they will detect if you mute the tab and go to another one to wait the ad out.
They’ll use a camera to see if you’re actually watching the ad or not.
Please drink verification can
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Dear YouTube,
Go fuck yourselves.
Sincerely, the 1% of people who actually use adblockers happily.
Or revanced/rvx extended.
Have you considered, you know paying for the service. God forbid you pay them.
clicks on link
It looks like you are using an ad-blocker
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I am paying for YouTube Premium, and yet I still have to skip over US-exclusive sponsor sections which almost every Youtuber has nowadays…
If you’re not already using it, this is gold: https://sponsor.ajay.app/
It’s funny how we need uBlock Origin, SponsorBlock and maybe even DeArrow (same dev as SB) to make Youtube tolerable.
I’d love DeArrow to be merged into SmartTubeNext.
Watching quite some youtube on my TV, and the clickbait suuuuuuucks.
That’s why I still use Vanced. Sponsorblock is something I can’t live without even though I have YouTube premium.
You should try revanced.
And SmartTubeNext on Android TV.
Yup. Just be careful the only real website is revanced.app and the github. All others are unofficial and can sometimes spread malware
Yeah, almost exclusively either Us-centric and not even available where I live, or so gosh darn expensive that I just will never use the stuff advertised (looking at you, magic spoon)
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you should check out linustechtips. The sponsors they get/accept are actually decent reputable companies with decent products.
My first impression for anything on YouTube is untrustworthy spam. Don’t matter who it is. It’s just the reality of paid sponsorships, and anyone being paid is going to generally talk up the positives, and talk up how much integrity they have. It’s not just a YouTube thing either. I assume the same for celebrity endorsements even if it is in an area they are an expert in like sports, since product they use isn’t the quality that reaches consumers. Sometimes even the products they use is crap and ends up hurting them. Example Lonzo Ball and the shoes he endorsed.
It’s just general good skepticism towards the marketing machine. Nobody is to be trusted when it comes to what they are paid to shill.
Linus’s video on their sponsors gave them way too much benefit of the doubt for scummy practices I would have dropped a company for
To be fair a lot of us here on Lemmy are likely to be more principled or have staunch opinions on companies and products - we’ve abandoned the orange R, and likely centralised social media for one thing.
From my POV, Linus seems to tone down his views in videos, and his writers are the ones doing the research for the video rather than him. He’s a lot more critical of companies on the WAN show from what I’ve seen
Doesn’t really matter if he is critical on one segment but not so much either. Or that the blame is shifted to the writers. But, I guess it’s just to say whoever it is sponsored segments are not to be trusted by default, and best being ignored.
Like even pro athletes end up shilling and using products that end up hurting them despite being in the 1% in their field like Lonzo Ball and his crappy shoes.
Here in Germany, the national soccer team has been advertising Nutella for decades. I don’t think they eat the chocolate flavored sugar-fat as much as they are paid to pretend…
Linus is getting sponsorship from either actually useful tech software that is for enterprise or it’s some weird niche software or product that no one ever needs.
Yeah, those are frustrating. Some channels I watch have a ton of annoying YouTube ads, where premium becomes a must for sanity. But some others have baked in sponsors that can’t be skipped (but no native YouTube ads). I wish they’d reconcile the two. It doesn’t make sense that you can pay to only block some ads, and depending on what videos you watch, that could be either the majority of ads or none at all!
Dear Youtube: Bring back the downvote count, allow me to disable shorts, allow me to disable your bullshit annoying ass startup music, then half the price and then we’ll talk about paying for your “service”.
Why would they ever do that when they can make the website more intrusive and annoying to use?
Why would they ever do that for free? Either the advertiser pays for the infrastructure, or you do. IT isn’t free. Hence YouTube premium.
Well, it was exactly as described and also free like 8 years ago.
The problem is that they make it unreasonable when they get greedy and many people don’t tolerate their shit. This isn’t a “people won’t pay for the service” problem. We’ve all paid for streaming services. I personally won’t when it feeds into their shenanigans.
That got me, the “you can only upvote stuff” bull. I should also have the option to block channels and videos.
Youtube has startup music???
Yeah this is new to me
Yep, on Smart TV devices there’s a startup tune.
Eww. I installed SmartTubeNext the day I got my first smart TV and never launched the official app.
Being able did disable content you don’t want aside from ads with a paid membership would be a huge boon.
Killing shorts would be fantastic, and they shouldn’t care if I’m not using a feature as long as I’m paying.
Why’s everything going to shit? The world is already shitty enough, lemme enjoy some escapism ffs.
The markets tanked which meant the cheap VC money dried up. Tech companies are rushing to implement the monetisation and cost-saving strategies they withheld before because it ruined the user growth now to ensure they are maintaining as much revenue as possible.
For close to 2 decades we had near 0 interest rates. VC daddies used that as an excuse to throw loads of money at every itiots pet project because hey, why not? They were able to absolutely roll in money and take out loans at criminally low rates.
But now rates are getting back to actually sane levels again, and suddenly the vc daddies are all sad because the infinite money pit has dried up and they actually have to be responsible with their money again. So now they’re turning to all of the companies that they gave money to and are saying “hey remember when I gave you money? Pay me back now. I don’t care if it means you have to fundamentally change the service that’s making you money, get me my money or I’ll bring you down with it.”
And since our economy is structured such that the money of wealthy people is more important than literally anything or anyone else in our society, the companies have no choice but to comply. So they all raise their prices and shore up the holes that weren’t letting them milk every cent out of their users.
Eshitification is a result of end stage capitalism. People are trying to extract their last bit of value before society goes tits up due to climate change.
Squeezing max profit has been part of it from day 1.
Ironic, thats u trying to leech off youtube for free
well they better be investing in bunkers and 100 years worth of canned beans.
They’re also betting on Aquaponics, sea-steading, and flying to Mars.
Let’s hope they also make close friends with their bunker guards, else the millionaire residents will be the first to get slaughtered.
You meant lemmy enjoy?
lemmy lemme lemmon same thing. What even is a word but words that someone worded, if you reword a word enough times the word doesn’t even sound like a word anymore. Word?
NewPipe, and YouTube Revanced are great apps you can use on mobile. They aren’t attached to any Google account so you can just use them and skip adds all day without getting any account theoretically banned.
For those who continue to use YouTube and adblockers on PC, simply just make a new throwaway Google account. In the case that they aren’t actually bluffing (they are) then at least your temp account will be banned.
fuck YouTube premium. why would I pay £19.99 a month when literally the only defining feature for me is no ads. all this will do is allow for more complex ad blockers to be made to bypass this
I pay for youtube premium because I watch a lot of youtube and it is easily worth the price. I paid $12 to see oppenhimer and that was only 3 hours. I watch way more than 3 hours of youtube every week.
There’s a lite version that’s only for the ads.
It’s cheaper than the full 19.99.
While that might still be too much, I just wanted to point out that if you don’t want ads, it doesn’t cost the full 20quid.
This was news to me so I went looking and couldn’t find it on youtube. Reading articles seems to indicate it is only available in certain regions and at certain times. I finally found the link to the page (https://www.youtube.com/premiumlite) and confirmed it’s not available for me in the US at least.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/premiumlite
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
The creators also get a good chunk of the money from premium as far as I’ve been able to verify (by asking some I follow directly).
Why not pay creators directly through Patreon PayPal or equivalent instead of Google as well?
If no one pays for YouTube how can they keep supporting their insanely costly infrastructure? Hosting all those videos is not free. Far from it.
I’m perfectly fine paying for YouTube if that means I can continue to have access to awesome creators under a easy to use platform. It would be a very sad day if Google decided to shut down YouTube due to not being able to cover it’s costs.
The only other company that could potentially take over would be meta. Which would probably be even worse. At least YouTube provides an option to pay to disable ads.
This is an extremely unlikely hypothetical. Google is one of the most profitable companies in the world and there is no sign of that changing, even considering all the people who block ads right now. There is no reason to squeeze everyone like this.
I would be fine if YouTube crumbled and was put into second place by a better platform or two.
Yes it’s the best option currently which is why they can do such ridiculous practices.
But once they have actual competition, I expect them to bend over backwards for my attention. Because if they don’t change the current trajectory, they’ll go the way of the other digital giants of the past.
Do not worry about having a viable platform in a future without YouTube. I am 100% sure there will be one.
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Good. Let them close it.
They won’t, because it’s still making money hand over fist. This is all because tech profits are down a smidge now we’re all getting back to normal after COVID, so they’re all cranking up the enshittification dial to compensate.
None of these companies are “losing” money. They’re just making very slightly less than they were before. Fuck 'em.
I just wish they kept the ads at the start and end. There is something off putting about watching some documentary about some horrible event only to have it pause for some perky Grammarly ad in the middle of it.
Well, for one thing it scales more efficiently. If you watch 50 creators, giving Google a 45% cut is more efficient than paying processing fees on $20 split 50 ways. If you want to be truly fair, the logistics become basically impossible without massively increasing your budget. That’s why, when most people opt to give directly, they’re effectively choosing to reward only their most favorite channels while giving nothing to everyone else.
I don’t necessarily think there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s not objectively superior to Premium, which does fairly distribute the creator’s cut. Google is able to endlessly split your $11 creator’s cut into micro-contributions based on exact watch-time in a way that individuals cannot replicate. Every creator you watch gets their share. Not as much as a direct donation, true, but nobody gets left out and it’s considerably more than they’d get from an ad-watching viewer.
Finally a good argument, thank you.
I agree that premium splits the percentage of my cash equally and easily but only 55% bugs me. That’s an arbitrary number based off of some black box calculation.
I do not trust YouTube to have my or the creators best interest in mind.
If this number was 90% for creators I would consider it fair. The majority of the work comes from creators and is the reason YouTube has any people at its doorstep.
In the meantime, I can still far less effectively make use of my money the way I want to until a better alternative comes around.
I’ll just have the sweat it and try harder to be a better consumer, I guess.
That’s an arbitrary number based off of some black box calculation.
It’s not arbitrary. It’s the same 55/45 split that creators have gotten from ad-revenue as part of the YouTube Partner Program. I can’t seem to find a source to prove it, but IIRC the split percentage has remained completely untouched for a very long time, maybe even since YPP was originally introduced in 2007.
I should also stress that this is a revenue split, not a profit split. Youtube pays all of their operating expenses after creators take their 55% share. It means that the final balance sheet for Youtube works out to something like (fudging): 55% creators, 25% expenses, 20% profit. I won’t shill for the shareholders – the deal could be better, but it’s not exactly highway robbery, either.
Thank you for the information. I needed some brushing up on all of it.
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